Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Sunset to Dusk, South Central Pennsylvania

 

I don't want to cheapen my blog, lol, but it appears that I may post to it via my Flickr account. This, essentially, is a test post using a photograph from a recent local road trip.

As common as sunset photos may be (from my Zoetrope days comes the mantra, "Flowers and sunsets and pets, oh my!"), there's much good always to having stayed outdoors to sunset or dusk and shooting through them.

I've read that even bears in Siberia know to bed down on ledges with a good view over the valleys westward.

Of course, it's good to turn around now and then and go from watching the sun set to watching evening come up in the east.

There's a short set of touristy touring shots at this location:

Click here for a short set of touring shots from July 5, 2010.

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One Earth, Many Peoples, Much Planning Ahead

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/69

YouTube poster "kowaxkowax".  "Long Way Round 6-2", posted August 8, 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsf1zdVQrlc

The first clip showed up on travel's web giant Matador Network (http://matadornetwork.com/); the second, while pulled from YouTube, comes from a series I've been watching via DVD from Netflix.  Both reflect two themes in the world's developing consciousness: 1) sustaining cultural diversity and integrity worldwide, which, whatever the compromises, I think something we may be obligated to do for one another, and 2) recognizing something quite like universal middle class goodwill and hospitality.

Not so oddly but also not so laudable, the Ewen McGregor and Charlie Boorman series Long Way Round starts with the inclusion of numerous snide comments and chauvanist and stereotypical remarks, especially blending traveler's fatigue with mafia-on-the-brain through encounters in the Ukrain, and while I wouldn't necessarily say all improves by arrival in Alaska, the photo-documentary aspect--the "what is shown" as opposed to "what is said"--clearly tells the better character of those engaged along the way, from Ukrainian mine workers to Mongolian welders to Russian truck drivers working in the back-of-beyond wilderness of Siberia.  Says Charlie Boorman after a while and out on a leg of the journey through Mongolia: ""Every single person we have met has been incredibly friendly, incredibly helpful, always wanting to help any way they can."

Wade Davis, the speaker in the first clip, has stellar credentials when it comes to observing the world's varied but perhaps now also uncovered cultures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade_Davis; http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/profile.cfm?article_id=1165).  Davis has been around, and speaking for cultural diversity in the first clip, he notes the following:

"The problem is not technology itself.  The Sioux Indians did not stop being  Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow anymore than an American stopped being an American when he gave up the horse and buggy.  It's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere.  It is power, the crude face of domination.  And whenever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away, these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to . . . ."

While there may be great evil in the inexorable working of things, especially in the workings of human societies, the contribution of the culture and travel sector may not be overlooked in also seeing a great goodness in the sentiment that would and probably will bind and weave in new ways the earth's separable and distinct cultural inventory.

Wade Davis's clip was coupled wtih an article beneath this title on the Matador Network: "The Death of a Culture Prompts the Question Why?" 

The subject of author Christine Garvin's story: the reduction of the Jewish community in Calcutta from 6,000 souls to a mere 30 (an Haaretz article cites similar figures: 5,000 near peak and 35 in 2008 -- http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1023072.html).  The facts may belie the writer's sentiment as expressed in the article title: rather than forces "beyond their capacity to adapt", a share of the Jews of Calcutta seem to have migrated to Israel, the United States, and elsewhere for greater opportunity while others may have married out of the Diaspora.  Today, with a subscription of 35 or less, of course, there's not population enough--women enough--to sustain recapitulation locally. 

With the Jews a healthy-enough cloud (plus 13 million souls) worldwide, however, the prospect of the spiritual evisceration of the people comes down to the security of the true anchor and homeland that is Israel (so much so that there are those in Israel who claim a Jew cannot be a Jew elsewhere). 

Charles Krauthammer's quoted statement may state the case in its most crystallized form:

"Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store." (Source: http://www.freeman.org/m_online/aug98/krauthmr.htm; initial reference: http://www.science.co.il/Israel-history.asp). 

The idea of identity melded with a place of origin has had always universal appeal and application.

Whether Persians, Jews, Pashtun, Inuit, or Piscataway (the original people in my land, Maryland) or Tamil, the ties between culture and the land and landscape of origin may be never overlooked, and here in this much traveled world made immeasurably smaller by global communications and transportation, they are not.  However, this generation and next few may do well, and this with the aid of eco- and ethno- academics and travelers from every wellspring, to survey the present legacy and promote strategies, cultural, legal, and social to preserve the histories of all and move on to defend, encourage, and sustain the best living societies potential in each.

Incidentally, in his book Far From Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community, author Charles London makes abundantly clear that Jews may be Jews in countries as different as Burma, Cuba, and Iran (each hosts their small communities) and that Judaism itself may be an adopted as well as inherited religion, an observation underscored by the still new, indigenous, and Jewish community in Uganda formed by the Abayudaya:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Madn_M_oOrI

I'll leave off here with this from the Ugandan part of Charles London's adventure through the Jewish Diaspora:

The Jews and their Sabbath were widely known here.  I found it remarkable that such a public form of Judaism existed in Uganda where Judaism had been illegal less than thirty years earlier.  This was, after all, the land of Idi Amin and the Lord's Resistance Army, a place that had known unspeakable ethnic and political violence, and still battled crushing poverty.  This was the sort of environment in which I imagined Jews would want to keep a low profile.  Even in Bosnia, where the Jews had earned a lot of respect in the community, they didn't go around advertising themselves in the market, and they certainly weren't greeted by their Muslim neighbors with hearty wishes for a peaceful Sabbath every Friday night.  What was going on here? (Far From Zion, p. 158).

Whatever Charles London's answer, and he has a few, I know mine: existence, co-existence, life, and joy.

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