![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
Democrats won big nationally in this off-year election. (These one-year-before-the-BIG-ONE elections are widely considered so unimportant most people don’t even bother to remember to vote.)
I voted, but then I’m a stickler about elections. Bought in early to the flaming rhetoric: People died so that you could ink in that little circle!
On the local level, Republicans swept both the large and vacuous county of Dutchess and the quaint and scenic village of Hyde Park.
I don’t honestly think party affiliation matters much at the local level. Hyde Park had a Democratic executive for many years who was pushing a municipal sewer system. (Believe it or not, Hyde Park doesn’t have one.)
There are actually pluses as well as minuses to not having a municipal sewer system. The plus is that it keeps out development! If Hyde Park had encouraged development, Hyde Park long ago would have become FDRworld, much as Orlando, Florida, is Disneyworld.
While the Dems were in power, they pushed the municipal sewer system to the general disparagement of Republicans.
When the Republicans ascended into power, installing a municipal sewer system was still the issue. Only now, they'd invented it!
I don’t think there’s danger of Hyde Park becoming FDRworld any longer—I mean, does anyone still even remember who FDR was? Wait! Didn’t he help Lincoln free the slaves? Or help George Washington cut down the cherry tree? Well, he did something.
Now the danger is that Hyde Park will become Culinary-Institute-of-America-world, ‘cause that municipal sewer system? It’s a-comin’!
My favorite election result actually is that exonerated "Central Park Five" member Yusef Salaam won a NYC Council seat.
Anyway. My PTSD was in full flower yesterday.
I desperately wanted someone to pat me on the head! Tell me, There, there, you brave little soldier, you! It’s all gonna be all right.
Instead, I soldiered on throughout the day and, in the evening, decided to watch (ulp) The Killing Fields, Roland Joffé’s brilliant film about the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
I am here to tell you that, however brilliant, The Killing Fields is not something you want to watch when you are feeling lonely, desperate, and filled with self-doubt.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-08 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-08 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-08 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-08 03:16 pm (UTC)Even on my computer screen, the killing fields are wrenching. The build-up to how Dith Pran stumbles across them—so artfully done. I'd seen the film when it first came out and remembered weeping hysterically afterward; I guess I figured seeing it before would have inoculated me against the horror.
It hadn't.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-08 03:24 pm (UTC)What made it so awful was that there are places that look peaceful and bucolic, until you read the signs describing, say, a tree which tell you that the Khmer Rouge used that tree to beat babies to death against.
The rest of the time I was in Cambodia, I kept looking at people about my age and wondering what they'd done in those days.
Sent from my iPhone
no subject
Date: 2023-11-08 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-08 03:30 pm (UTC)That's one of the reasons why I take the radicalization of adolescents so seriously.
There was a reason why Pol Pot filled his armies with soldiers under 16: People that age are essentially amoral; there's nothing outside peer group pressure that controls them.
(The film actually does a terrific job of portraying this.)
no subject
Date: 2023-11-08 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-11 11:17 pm (UTC)(super photos)
no subject
Date: 2023-11-11 11:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-12 01:56 pm (UTC)Max was not as awful as a teen, but as he explained to me years later, that's because he led a life of complete subterfuge.
no subject
Date: 2023-11-12 01:57 pm (UTC)