The Ferguson Photos

The recent photos of over-armed police pointing guns at unarmed people in Ferguson, Missouri, have a special resonance with me and apparently to many other people. I've thought a lot about the question of why this is, why these images are so exciting to me, why they are so deeply familiar and meaningful.

The best understanding I can come up with, that I keep coming back to, is that these photos express exactly how I have personally felt going to school and college, living in the USA during the Civil Rights fight and the Viet-Nam and the Iraq wars and  the Reagan-plus years of programmatic selfishness and the hatred-of-Obama years.

The very popularity of such photos as these is a great ray of hope because it suggests that humanity is alive and even unkillable despite all these years.