Violence leads to Frivolous

OK, so it has been a while. I have been really busy. Out of town too much, and not enough hours Monday through Friday. But this one burns me. It goes back to something I have discussed before, blame, fault, and the fact that someone else has to be to blame for everything.

Earlier this year, in Savannah, where I went to college, a young female college student was raped in the middle of the night, while walking through an empty parking lot. Now, this is a terrible thing, so don’t get me wrong here. I am not suggesting she is at fault. By no means. It was reported that she was allegedly, love that word; subject for later, raped by a vagrant. And from experience, there are a lot of those in Savannah, and they are hard to catch up to, since, well, they have no address. But this case went to court. Not to press charges against the vagrant, if and when they ever find him. But the case is being brought against the owner of the parking lot and the contractor using it as over flow parking for a jobsite during working hours. This parking lot looks just like every other parking lot in Savannah. And there are a lot of them. It is illuminated in accordance with the City of Savannah’s very strict lighting ordinances, and it is well maintained. She is suing the owner of the parking lot and the contractor for not properly securing the parking lot. Really. And how would you propose to do that. Build a really tall wall around it, so that if you are in there, and get accosted, NO ONE CAN SEE IN to help you. So that you can’t see anything going on in that lot. Not in Savannah, no way, you would have all sorts of vagrants, drug dealers and assorted other social deviants hiding out in there, away from the eyes of local law enforcement.

My problem is this, why on earth would you want to hold the owner of a parking lot responsible for something like this. Why? And why does someone think they can sue them for a large sum of money as a result. Since when does any wrong in a persons life automatically give them the right to find a lawyer, and make a ton of money from this. I know it will strike a chord, but I think it is really some lawyer trying to find a way to make a big paycheck for his firm. And that to me, is reprehensible, not as much as the original act of violence, but it is working on it, to drag good citizens, and businesses into such a case, make them spend their hard earned money to defend themselves as if they were the ones who personally committed the crime. This is what I call frivolous; there is no better way to describe it.

Sorry, this one bothered me, it hit home being that I spent a lot of time in Savannah, and I know the contractor being sued. It has bugged me for a few days now, just had to vent.

Photographs Capture Memories

While in Kansas recently, I got to return to the hometown of my mother; Fowler, Kansas. She grew up there, went through all of her years of school there, and her mother lived there until just a few years ago. And then when I was young, we went there fairly often. It was a few hours from where my other grandparents lived. So it was not out of the way to go visit. I had not been back there in nearly 15 years. And I had forgotten a lot about the icons, the look, feel and smell of a small wheat farming town in western Kansas. it was dry, windy, and flat for as far as you could see. And the looming grain elevators are visible for miles. I remember driving past the Fowler Equity grain elevator growing up, it was on the main road, the only road in or out of Fowler. When I saw it again on this last trip, it just struck me in a way I can't explain. It reminded me of all the trips into Fowler, and how it had not changed much, because Fowler had not changed much. I just had to take some pictures of it, I had to capture that memory, even though the picture will never convey what went on in my head when we drove past it. I don't know when I will ever go back to Fowler, maybe one day to show my children where my mother grew up, where my grandparents were laid to rest. But until then, I wanted to be able to capture that piece of my history, that part of my memories from my childhood. I am sure that none of the family in the car on that hot dusty road understood why I wanted to get out and trek out through a dusty field to take a picture of some old grain elevator. But I knew why.

The Fowler Equity Exchange and that which supports it. The second picture has so much more depth to it than I thought when I took it. The wheat almost feels like it is coming off the screen.