the fix
I took this November 5th, 2008 in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Featured in the Designing Obama book.
The question becomes, what did we really expect? The explosive euphoria that greeted the election results less than two years ago has been replaced by the slow burn of disappointment, culminating in our current predicament, a time when the worst are now full of passionate intensity. Two years ago the prospect of Obama’s election, passage of healthcare reform, and the ostensible cessation of combat in Iraq would all seem to be legitimately good things for the country. So what gives? Why is there now the lingering sense of failure, the sneaking sensation that things are still broken in a way that can’t be ceremoniously repaired? Is it that wars that begin with a shock demand a suitably definitive conclusion? Or has the concept of what is good and bad become as malleable as the truth. Truth that is now divorced from reality, forever an unattainable subjective concept always just out of reach. When objectivity becomes nonexistent, unarmed truth is just another thing to debate. A culture’s values are constantly in flux, that’s nothing new, but what happens when a pluralistic society becomes so fractured it can no longer decide on just what its shared values really are anymore, good and bad are interchangeable while two competing truths can hold equal validity in common discourse. Interesting times ahead.