Post by corey on Jun 1, 2006 17:32:52 GMT -5
It’s as true through a viewfinder as in the tense tumult that ends one day and begins another: Misanthropy is everywhere.
This unlikely message awaited discovery yesterday, scrawled on the side of a rusted tank near the railroad tracks in a slice of New Bern that downtown redevelopment abandoned or overlooked completely.
Gawking at such an abstruse communiqué, I snapped several photos of the unlikely scene with my work camera and committed the graffito to memory.
It’s not immediately clear if the graffitist was himself or herself a misanthrope — one thoroughly frustrated and disenchanted with humanity and human nature — or if the message’s author was expressing fatigue for the modern age’s prevailing sentiments of pessimism and misanthropy.
Most graffiti I’ve seen, whether in central Florida’s suburbia, New York City’s grit and gristle core or here in the historic and historically diverse Bear City, takes a great deal more words to communicate outmoded and hostile ideas of far lesser importance.
Take, for example, the odious white supremacist graffiti on the wooden fence alongside Hotel Road and behind the Books-a-Million.
But whatever the inscription’s significance and whoever its author, I took it as a caution to keep my growing cynicism in check. After all, misanthropy is everywhere.
I’ll opt for optimism and trust in life’s providential potential — even when I should know better.
{Cross-posted}
This unlikely message awaited discovery yesterday, scrawled on the side of a rusted tank near the railroad tracks in a slice of New Bern that downtown redevelopment abandoned or overlooked completely.
Gawking at such an abstruse communiqué, I snapped several photos of the unlikely scene with my work camera and committed the graffito to memory.
It’s not immediately clear if the graffitist was himself or herself a misanthrope — one thoroughly frustrated and disenchanted with humanity and human nature — or if the message’s author was expressing fatigue for the modern age’s prevailing sentiments of pessimism and misanthropy.
Most graffiti I’ve seen, whether in central Florida’s suburbia, New York City’s grit and gristle core or here in the historic and historically diverse Bear City, takes a great deal more words to communicate outmoded and hostile ideas of far lesser importance.
Take, for example, the odious white supremacist graffiti on the wooden fence alongside Hotel Road and behind the Books-a-Million.
But whatever the inscription’s significance and whoever its author, I took it as a caution to keep my growing cynicism in check. After all, misanthropy is everywhere.
I’ll opt for optimism and trust in life’s providential potential — even when I should know better.
{Cross-posted}