Anon

Gold Coast, Australia – photo shoot for Joy Electric

 

Advertising. Who needs a face?

 

A new wave

Miami beach, Florida, USA

 

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. 

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

~ Hunter S. Thompson

In light of the coming results of the US presidential election, let Obama not be another water mark, but a new wave. At risk of sounding overly idealistic and similarly cynical, i am harbouring a dimly glittering hope for different times. 

We have to stop eating ourselves alive, crippling ourselves with dysfunctional and yet norm-approved political frameworks. We need to begin crossing the chasm between knowledge and action and empowering hope politics instead of giving in to the weakest and most selfish versions of ourselves and pandering to terror politics. 

We need to stop feeding the impotent rage of the disenchanted and pushing people closer and closer to the edge of abysmal desperation… the desperation of poverty, hunger, rape and destruction that fuels the horror of guerilla warfare in the urban jungles of city streets.

Obama might not be the answer. No singular person may fill those gargantuan shoes. Only us… the mass, the mob, the people who have forgotten what it means to be a part of a greater whole and affecting change for the betterment of others and therefore ourselves. 

But he is a hope. And a sign of interesting times to come.