It's almost a perfect expression of entropy isn't it? With a 47% literacy rate, it shouldn't be surprising that among the detritus of civilization, we would find books.
My thought exactly.
I wonder what would happen if some enterprising individual took pictures like this and scenes from around the country and held them up in large form so our candidates could see them?
Outstanding idea, UpN. I'd love to hear what people vying for positions in public office would say about these sorts of pictures (which I'd be willing to bet could be found in many, many other parts of the country).
Would the be ignored? Would we get to see their fake crocodile sympathy? Or would the people around them get angry enough to force some action?
America needs to wake up and realize that the Third world lives in the First world.
My guess is what I've bolded above: a lot of handwringing and vehement deploring of the situations which produce such scenes, intended almost completely for public consumption. But I just don't see the will being there.
And that is part of the problem: massive, public outrage over such pictures would produce quick reaction from cynical politicians, I've no doubt, but that outrage seems to be... lacking, in many quarters. Once upon a time, I seem to recall something in a history of the Middle Ages mentioning, books were so rare and precious that when one monastery lent another monastery books to be copied, men-at-arms accompanied the volumes to protect them. The scriptoria were kept busy from earliest light to sunset, with monks working in cold, wet, miserable conditions to copy not just religious mss., but volumes on science and philosophy that had been brought back from the Crusades or copied by European visitors to Byzantine libraries. The awe with which people regarded the written word, and the knowledge that was contained in these texts, is hard for us to visualize. You have to wonder what happened along the way.
I've been thinking about that photograph and it occurred to me that our attitude towards transcribed information has changed radically as we've developed other means of storing it. But the growth of electronic media and the technology for storing and retrieving records has come at the price of oversight: once upon a time, for example, something like the
Encyclopædia Brittanica featured articles written by Nobel Prize winners or their equivalents, and publication even in ordinary outlets was relatively heavily vetted. And the post-publication reviewing process has always played a big part in the cut-and-thrust of the development of knowledge. I think a lot of that kind of concern for documentation and accuracy has diminished considerably over the past couple of decades; the emergence of Wikipedia as a supposedly authoritative source is just one indication of this. The is way more information out there now, in transient, unscrutinized venues, and, as an old professor of mine used to say, it's getting harder to find the diamonds buried in trash cans that big. But some of that attitude may be what's reflected in the photo AoG posted...
