I was thinking about that last post about guns, and I wanted to add an addendum. But first I want to talk about art.
There was a piece I saw in a museum while visiting Amsterdam that really struck me. It was a beautifully rendered picture of a man hanging up-side-down who had been disemboweled. There was a hungry dog greedily lapping a the pool of viscera gathering under the hanging hands of the dangling corpse.
I know, right? Disgusting. I thought it was possibly likely that the painter had witnessed this scene in his community, maybe more then once, and decided to depict it. I imagine him looking at that graphic and public display probably with some approximation of how we must look at it, here in our time in history. I think artists specifically have a tendency look at things happening around society and notice details that seem wrong, that other people might just accept as 'the status quo'. Like a disemboweled man hanging from bound ankles.
We're all civilized now thought, right? We would certainly not be carrying out any kind of execution in a public square. But the civilization of mankind does seem to be an on-going process that we are really only in the beginning of.
There is undoubtedly things we are all doing that our future descendents will call barbaric. I imagine, if humanity survives itself, that we will all come to the common realization that people should never kill other people. That the very idea of that happening would completely absurd. This would be a society that could safely have guns in it.
I'm SUCH a dreamer, right? It'll happen. Just give it 3 or 4 hundred years. If civilization continues, future humans will look back on all this gun violence we have now in much the same way we now look back at the dangling, disemboweled man. I think that it is inevitable that this will be the case.
There was a piece I saw in a museum while visiting Amsterdam that really struck me. It was a beautifully rendered picture of a man hanging up-side-down who had been disemboweled. There was a hungry dog greedily lapping a the pool of viscera gathering under the hanging hands of the dangling corpse.
I know, right? Disgusting. I thought it was possibly likely that the painter had witnessed this scene in his community, maybe more then once, and decided to depict it. I imagine him looking at that graphic and public display probably with some approximation of how we must look at it, here in our time in history. I think artists specifically have a tendency look at things happening around society and notice details that seem wrong, that other people might just accept as 'the status quo'. Like a disemboweled man hanging from bound ankles.
We're all civilized now thought, right? We would certainly not be carrying out any kind of execution in a public square. But the civilization of mankind does seem to be an on-going process that we are really only in the beginning of.
There is undoubtedly things we are all doing that our future descendents will call barbaric. I imagine, if humanity survives itself, that we will all come to the common realization that people should never kill other people. That the very idea of that happening would completely absurd. This would be a society that could safely have guns in it.
I'm SUCH a dreamer, right? It'll happen. Just give it 3 or 4 hundred years. If civilization continues, future humans will look back on all this gun violence we have now in much the same way we now look back at the dangling, disemboweled man. I think that it is inevitable that this will be the case.