jmak:
Thanks, Steve.
Posting designs like this one makes me paranoid, because I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not original. I enjoyed the process regardless, but please let me know if somebody else beat me to the idea!
Thoughts?
I’ve experimented with my significance before, and it’s never yielded the results I’d hoped for. I’ve walked away, or simply faded quite deliberately to see if I would be recalled, instead all it did was confirm what I thought. When I see the fragility in others, I’m automatically drawn to want to comfort them, to make them realise that they’re not worthless, nor insignificant. And I do this not because I want them to like me, but because I want them to like themselves. But it’s usually a wasted effort. It usually ends up proving that significance is not something that can be achieved, but only something that can be given. So I give significance to more people than I should, and receive it from far too few for it to have given me a balanced life, let alone an amazing one. My efforts to make others believe in themselves is either rewarded by them doing so and moving on without me, or dismissing my efforts and moving on without me. But the reciprocation always eludes me.
it’s weird, realizing that we’re never going to find that one person who will understand us like we’ve always wanted to be understood.
Never say never…the trick is to be paying attention at the time that that person does come along, and be sure not to be distracted by the irrelevant, or the insignificant, or worse still the aesthetic. We’re so busy conjuring up images of perfection in what we’re looking for in someone that we want as a soul mate, or at least a true companion, that we forget to notice that those conjured images are focused on the packaging and not the substance.
We seek someone who will understand us, love us unconditionally, and accept us with all our flaws, but when they come along, we’re not willing to accept them because they’re not fair enough, trendy enough, cultured enough or socially acceptable enough, and all they end up being is a great person but…
So instead of conjuring up images of what the perfect partner will be like, wouldn’t that time be better spent realising what’s really important? We always seem to know what we want, but rarely what we need. In a time when sensationalism and masks are in vogue, it’s almost impossible to obtain a clarity of thought that would allow for a distinction between the mundane and the significant, the urgent and the important, or the reality from the dream.
This is not a critique of the original post, or the blogger…simply a vent of a passion that the post aroused within me. Thank you for sharing that thought.
Children of Agent Orange.
Fifty years ago this month, in the early stages of the Vietnam War, the US military began spraying rural areas of the country with the herbicide, Agent Orange. The programme’s goal was to defoliate forested land, depriving the enemy Viet Cong of cover and driving peasants to the cities, thus destroying the Viet Cong’s support base and food supply.
Over the next 10 years more than 80 million litres were deployed across 7.4 million hectares of Vietnam, eastern Laos and parts of Cambodia. They were an effective defoliant, but there is strong evidence that the deadly dioxins contained in Agent Orange also had a catastrophic effect on the health of millions of Vietnamese – killing hundreds of thousands and causing dreadful diseases and birth defects in subsequent generations right up to this day.
Vietnam’s forgotten war victims.
The real victims…if only the same amount of effort and focus was placed on them and millions of others that are victims to the American war machine rather than the perpetual and grossly imbalanced focus on vengeance for crimes that are rarely proven to be the making of the accused.
What They did not want you to ever find out is that your generation, the generation born between 1980-1995, actually outnumbers the Baby Boomers. They knew that if you ever turned your eye towards political reform, you could change the world.
They tried to keep you sated on vapid television shows and vapid music. They cut off your education and fed you brain candy. They took away your music and gave you Top Ten pop stations. They cut off your art and replaced it with endless reality shows for you to plug into, hoping you would sit quietly by as They ran the world. I think They thought you were too dumb to notice.
Indeed, I thought They had won.
But I watched you occupy the capital of Wisconsin. I see you today as you occupy Wall Street. And I see a spark, a glimmer of the glorious new age that is yours. A changing of the guard, a guard that has stood for entirely too long and needs your young legs to take his place.
I watch you turn away from what is easy and stand up for what is right. I see you understand we as a society are only as strong as our weakest link. I see you wise beyond your years. And I am proud. Give ‘em hell, kids. You are beautiful.
