Hope #21 Black Lives Matter

Posted by Cranford
Hope #21 Black Lives Matter

The 21st image of hope is that of an incarcerated police officer. Police officers in the US have been murdering Black men and at the rate of 2 per day since the end of the Civil War without any consequences. They have been killing Native Americans at almost the same rate, with impunity. It is “Shoot first. Ask questions never.” Police even execute Black men who are handcuffed in the back of police cars, in front of their children, who have done nothing wrong, and face no consequences. The Bible is full of warnings of judgment against a society who does not punish the wrongdoer, or who does not avenge those who oppress those of low degree. America claims to be a land of freedom and rights. This is NOT what people of color see, which is the majority of the world. It is not what anyone who knows the facts see, either.

I painted the bars red, as if dripping with the blood of the innocents. It would be horrible to see a violent backlash against police and a complete breakdown of the social order. But that is what the police and the courts are bringing us to, if they do not execute just judgment. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

For those who concocted “Blue Lives Matter” I have this to say: it is pure racism! There is no such thing as a blue life! People choose to be police officers. Multiple incidents have borne the lie of that. There was an off-duty Black police officer who was approached by officers. He was carrying in an open carry state. He had a permit. He was doing nothing illegal, were he White or Black. An officer opened fire on him. Another officer recognized him and told the other one to stop. He refused to stop, because he was Black! So all blue lives matter for is preferential treatment, if they happen to also be White.

It needs to end!

This is #21 in my images of hope for Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2018

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $20 plus postage

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Hope #20 Children

Posted by Cranford
Hope #20 Children

The fact that we keep desiring to have children and keep having children is probably the greatest sign of the level of hope most humans have in the future. Against all indications to the contrary, we still feel things are going to get better for our children.

This is #20 in my images of hope for Perkasie Fun-A-Day 2018

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $25 reduced to $15 plus postage

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Hope #19 Solar Power

Posted by Cranford
Hope #19 Solar Power

The 19th of my 31 images of hope is Solar Power. It isn’t complicated. There is the sun. There is a wind generator. (It is not a windmill, since it is not grinding grain into flour.) There is a solar collector. This could represent either or both a photo-voltaic collector and/or a heat collector. Then there is a hydro-electric generating dam. These are all solar. It is the sun that causes the winds to blow and that evaporates the water for clouds to carry it inland to rain and feed the rivers, etc. Solar power is not alternative power. It is just power. Fossil fuels all started out as solar power. Plants and animals of bygone aeons lived on what the sun provided. Their remains got buried and digested in the earth in such a way as to yield concentrated, portable, ancient, solar energy. The thing is, this was likely a once in the life-cycle of the planet event. At least, it’s not going to happen again in the life-cycle of our so-called civilization.

For the last couple hundred years, we have been burning fossil fuels as if they were income, when they are really capital. What is even more foolish, is that governments, particularly the US government, have  been subsidizing their consumption. Today (2018), if the US were to subsidize solar energy at an equal level that it does petroleum (to say nothing about the wars for it), it would be 20% cheaper. The price would only come down as usage increased. I don’t get why so-called capitalists, and so-called conservatives are so profligate that they do not conserve their capital. They burn it, while creating great deficits to do so. All the while refusing to lay the groundwork for us to live on our income, the sun. We should have been using this great find of fossil fuels to build solar collectors of various sorts to fuel the world’s technology cleanly. That was Edison’s vision. All these capitalists see is the next quarterly report for what they are doing now. So they rape the earth and pollute our water for one more drop of oil. What is the Middle East doing? They are building total, solar cities. Why? They know that the oil is about gone.

Our only hope to not literally drown ourselves and our children is to abandon fossil fuels now and commit totally to solar power like Pres. Jimmy Carter wanted to, 40 years ago. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $25 reduced to $10 plus postage

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Hope #18 Liberal Education

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Hope #18 Liberal Education

The 18th image of hope in the Fun-A-Day series represents a liberal education. Liberal does not represent a political position. It is the classical meaning of liberating, as in “liberal arts”. As a society, we have trashed these and turned universities into trade schools and turned students into cogs and “human capital”, i.e., wage slaves, in the capitalist system. Corporations fund research in universities to no benefit of students. Students still end up in debt for life, with no recourse, even through bankruptcy. Today, students graduate from Ivy League schools without being able to construct or even properly read a complex English sentence. They pay their money. They get their job tickets. Trump graduated from University of Pennsylvania.

A liberal education doesn’t so much teach someone what to think or give them facts, but teaches them how to think; what questions to ask; how to research to find facts and truth.

Yet there are talented and intelligent people who are not given opportunities because they could not afford to go to college. Appropriate higher education should be available and free to everyone who qualifies for it, if we truly believe in equality, and want to advance as a people, and want to solve humanity’s problems. Degrees should not be job tickets, nor is education limited to institutions. Lincoln never graduated college. He read the law. Pres. Carter was home schooled. He is a nuclear physicist.

The bookshelf is not full. That indicates that those who read, study and learn, will have their own books to write, to add to the “great conversation”, as Mortimer Adler called it. This is our hope for our children and our grandchildren. It has been stifled by the tuition financing system and the wicked bankers and their fascist partners in Congress, in both falsely so-called major parties. They need to go if hope is to survive.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $75 plus postage.

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Hope #17 Clean Air

Posted by Cranford
Hope #17 Clean Air

“Nothing but blue skies from now on!”, the song says. The first Earth Week really shook up President Richard Nixon. I was 14. I headed it up in my junior high. We actually made the evening news on our local, CBS affiliate for one of our actions. 70 of us, without any adult supervision, rode our bicycles with environmental slogans on signs on them, from Carl Sandberg Jr. High in Golden Valley to Hennepin Ave, in downtown Minneapolis with trash bags and collected litter and trash all up and down Hennepin and placed the mountain of trash in bags at the base of the flags on Nicollet Mall. Then we biked home. Now, if we were the only one, and that was all we did, it would have been cute. But it wouldn’t have impacted federal policy. But that was just the last of several actions we did that week. Hundreds of us had abandoned the buses and walked or bicycled several miles each way to school that week. We participated in a teach-in, etc. This was student organized. Thousands of schools and colleges and universities had environmental fairs and demonstrations. Nearly all regular classes across the country on almost all levels of education were replaced on Wednesday of that week with Earth Day Teach-Ins that happened in the fresh air when at all possible. This all happened before the internet, before cellphones, without paid TV commercials or magazine ads. It scared the living daylights out of Richard Milhouse Nixon. He knew the only possible way he could get re-elected was if he would address environmental issues. He created the Environmental Protection Agency. The impact of that act and the ensuing regulations on the improvement on urban air quality, reduction of lung cancer, emphysema, asthma and a number of other ailments is amazing.

Yet, there are those who would go back to the bad old days and deregulate. They think it is too expensive to have low emissions and clean air. Here is a photo of Los Angeles before and after the EPA.

Let’s hope for blue skies from now on.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $10 plus postage

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Hope #16 Bridges Rather Than Walls

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Hope #16 Bridges Rather Than Walls

This is a simple painting of a bridge across a stream. We can take bridges for granted in a country as developed as the US, until they start to fall apart. A few years ago, a bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis / St. Paul, which I had crossed countless times as a child and young adult, collapsed in the middle of rush hour. We use bridges here in Bucks Co., PA that are hundreds of years old. A couple of years ago several of them were closed for repairs. It was an inconvenience and messed up traffic. All of a sudden people who were 2 minutes down the road were now 45 minutes apart, what, with all the detours. My point is that bridges bring people together.

Walls have the opposite effect. The Great Wall and the Berlin Wall were both grand failures. International borders are soft walls even without the physical walls. They create artificial barriers that divide people and limit freedom. Their use to limit the movement of people by use of passports, visas, etc., is an invention of modern nation states. To build a wall to make that control absolute is totalitarianism. To do so in a nation whose infrastructure is crumbling such as ours is, is not just ironic, it is criminal!

Mexicans have been emigrating from the US at a rate higher than the rate they have been immigrating to the US for, at least, the last 12 years. If the wall gets built, it will be to keep Americans in.

Painting is acrylic on 8″ x 8″ stretched canvas.

Price: $20 reduced to $10 plus postage

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Hope #15 Racial Equality

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Hope #15 Racial Equality

When I was a child there was a “Flesh” Crayon in my box of 64 colors. It was for an obviously pale complected person like me. Some time in the 1970s, Binney & Smith replaced the wrapper on that Crayon with “Peach”. It was the same color, only the times had changed. By the mid 1980s, I saw a box of 16 Crayons, which were all different shades. All 16 were labeled “Flesh”. The times, they had changed! By the time Obama was elected in 2008, some White folks presumed to declare that we had become “post-racial”, proving just how out of touch they were with the Black, Hispanic, and Native American experience in this country. American police murder an average of two Black men and 1 to 2 Native Americans every day without consequence. They have been doing this every day for over 150 years. Then there are the incarceration rates, the jobless rates. The infant mortality rates, and on and on.

Then Trump appoints Nazis and KKK and openly supports them from the White House! It looks bad now. But, believe me, he is an old man and not healthy. His party and the Democrats are not healthy. A new day is coming.

We dare to hope! We want the whole box of Crayons! People are people!

Bigots can go to hell, sooner rather than later, please!

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $20 reduced to $10 plus postage

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Hope #14 LGBTQ

Posted by Cranford
Hope #14 LGBTQ

I never said hope isn’t controversial. One person’s hopes and aspirations can seem threatening to another’s view of the world or their economic grip on things. When slaves hope for freedom, their masters’ standard of living and leisure is threatened. When the Lesbian Gay Bi Transgender and Queer become visible and vocal, religious authoritarians and others who are afraid of losing their positions of authority if gender lines get blurred or gender oppression were to end get riled up. This is to hope that bullying will stop, human rights will be respected; civil rights will be extended; and we will learn to live at peace and with respect for one another.

The painting is actually the middle square set at a 45° angle.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $20 reduced to $10 plus postage

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Hope #13 Biodiversity

Posted by Cranford
Hope #13 Biodiversity

We hope to stop global warming and preserve biodiversity. This is a painting of a Butterfly Fish on a coral reef. Butterfly Fish are about the same size as sunfish or rock bass, 5 to 6 inches long. They have a 7 to 10  year lifespan and mate for life. There are a wild variety of colors and patterns of Butterfly Fish, but their numbers in the wild are decreasing. They are endangered, due to global warming and pollution killing the coral reefs which provide their food and protection.

What is truly sick is that there are many wealthy, older capitalists who don’t care about the future of the planet. I have actually heard them speaking about this. All they care about is that their stock portfolios do well enough to take care of them until they die. There was even a so-called Christian Secretary of the Interior Watts, under Reagan, who said that we did not have to preserve our natural resources in our parklands, because “Jesus was coming back soon.” I signed a record-setting petition for his removal. Reagan finally listened. Trump’s team is worse and he is deaf.

Painting is acrylic on 6″ x 6″ x 1.75″ stretched canvas.

Price: $25 reduced to $10 plus postage

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