by emma | May 27, 2007 | Social Justice, Words
“The American flag stands for the fact that cloth can be very important. It is against the law to let the flag touch the ground or to leave the flag flying when the weather is bad. The flag has to be treated with respect. You can tell just how important this cloth is because when you compare it to people, it gets much better treatment. Nobody cares if a homeless person touches the ground. A homeless person can lie all over the ground all night long without anyone picking him up, folding him neatly and sheltering him from the rain.
School children have to pledge loyalty to this piece of cloth every morning. No one has to pledge loyalty to justice and equality and human decency. No one has to promise that people will get a fair wage, or enough food to eat, or affordable medicine, or clean water, or air free of harmful chemicals. But we all have to promise to love a rectangle of red, white, and blue cloth.
Betsy Ross would be quite surprised to see how successful her creation has become. But Thomas Jefferson would be disappointed to see how little of the flag’s real meaning remains.”
[Charlotte Aldebron, 12 years old]
HT: Trevor
DISCLAIMER: This was written by an American child. That is why the American flag is mentioned. While pledging allegiance to the flag does not happen in the UK, I fully believe that we echo these sentiments in a multitude of other ways. Thus I am not being anti-American!
by emma | May 16, 2007 | Words
“It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country. Most photographers would feel a certain embarrassment in admitting publicly that they carried within them a sense of wonder, yet without it they would not produce the work they do, whatever their particular field. It is the gift of seeing the life around them clearly and vividly, as something that is exciting in its own right. It is an innate gift, varying in intensity with the individual’s temperament and environment.”
[Bill Brandt]
H/T: Darrell
by emma | May 14, 2007 | Words
“I’ve heard it said that if you don’t believe God created the world in six literal days you are denying that Jesus died on the cross. A day in Jupiter is over 300 years long – I guess it depends on where God was standing!”
[Matt Hyam, speaking at the VPN conference]
by emma | May 10, 2007 | Words
It’s the wrong kind of place
To be thinking of you…
by emma | May 4, 2007 | Words
“I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.”
[Marlene Dietrich]
by emma | Apr 29, 2007 | Words
He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.
[A Footnote To All Prayers – C.S. Lewis]
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