Although a review of my weekly posts wouldn’t suggest a real or metaphorical use of rose-colored eyewear with regard to my perception of the world around me, I also do not look for the most broken bits of the human condition to inconsequentially rail against. The power and ever-increasing incidence of intolerance and cruelty usually trump the whimper of their meager counterparts and I have to react, just in case some ear I may reach was somehow previously deaf to the outrage. I remain vigilant, even if one ear is the extent of my influence.
This week, I watched a fascinating documentary, The Salt of the Earth, about the life of the brilliant Brazilian photographer, Sebastião Salgado, who set off on a more than forty-year quest to find the light of hope in the eyes and faces of the most oppressed peoples on Earth, only to finally succumb to man’s inhumanity to man. Feeling emotionally defeated, he returned from self-exile to the idyllic paradise of his grandfather’s vast farm in Central Brazil only to find the lush, tropical beauty of his childhood to be a barren wasteland brought about by the man-made devastation of the surrounding rain forest. The refusal of Sebastião and his wife, Lélia, to accept one more insult to Nature is but a brief dénouement to the film, but what they accomplished and continue to accomplish at
will make your heart smile.