Wrinkled faces

I have been watching Ken Burns' 'Dust Bowl' documentary which basically is an amazing piece of work but what else do we expect from Burns anyway? Apart from the fact that one can learn a lot from it about a time in history which the modern America has been all too eager to forget, what struck me the most about it were the faces of the time. People who were kids then living with their parents on the prairie farms of Oklahoma, Kansas, east Colorado, and north Texas. Their families were trying to make a living out of growing wheat on what turned into immense dust fields through dust storms thousands of feet high. They tell their stories with touching fear of the hardships they had to face and nostalgia about the freedom of the vast expanse of the great American plains. You can almost see in their distant eyes the memories of the Sun setting over an oval horizon with nothing to obstruct the view save a shanty which their fathers built over farms which extended for thousands of acres. It is a beautiful and quiet image and one which draws me further into the romanticism of it all and irrevocably presents counterpoints in the current climate.

I quite like the stories of these people and I understand the essence of the broken lines which form those wrinkles. You can tell that these were people who really faced problems in their lives and they tried to make the best out of a really bad situation. You can feel that uprightness in them which you can find in those who have worked hard in their lives to surmount their issues. And you wonder, you cannot help but wonder, what is it in the current American life which compares to that kind of hardship. I have broad brushes with which I paint thick lines and sometimes my colors leak out from within the boundaries. With such a homogenized viewpoint, I find it impossible to take people's issues seriously in current America, a realization that is only growing as time passes. Of course people here have issues but if they only compared those across time and space... In relation to such things I have been occupying myself by working on my sneers and chuckles.