When the first settlers came to the country that is now called the USA, they were looking for religious freedom. Freedom for quite some time was not for all, even there. Viewed from over here, we see all those facts that make it hard to celebrate, especially these days. A bitter reckoning, mostly.
Yes, they made it. Somehow. But the ups and especially the downs are memorable. When someone like the present president from the extreme right is at the head of a government that does everything to revert back to times we have put behind us for more than 300 years… it can become irritating. Namely: feudal structures: A ‘king’ who claims the whole power for himself and would, if he could, reign for ever. Have everybody do his bid.
It’s awfully amazing that someone like that could actually ‘be flushed to the surface’, scum, in a country claiming to be the oldest existing democracy. Due to money: Paying for the necessary advertisements, these days mostly online.
Lives have been lost. The peoples of America, of the whole continent, close to complete obliteration, just because settlers felt they had the right to the land… Cruelty, hatred and death daily; around the world, the latest the war against Iran. For what?
Greed. Power. Money. Oil.
I feel it to be a challenge in face of all this and many more facts, to mention all the fine aspects too:
Literature, arts, painting, music and movies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Steinbeck, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Harper Lee, George Gershwin… a long and impressive list that here can show only a very few.
“Moving pictures”: To think that some of the greatest artists in that field came from Europe, again: Fritz Lang, Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergmann, Wolfgang Petersen, Hans Zimmer, and many more, and, towering them all like a small yet wonderful figure of heart and brains:
Charles Chaplin.
He developed ‘the flickers’, moving pictures, into an art form, in a career of over 50 years, coming from most desperate surroundings himself. He knew. Bless his heart.
Charles Chaplin who made it clear what life is about: About empathy in the most tragic and desperate situations. About laughter and that smile he even worked into a song, whose lyrics were created a few years later, in 1954, rendered by Nat King Cole in that manner that encompasses it all: Life at its most wonderful and most tragic.
