Truly outstanding set of images, and your commentary is much appreciated.

Nothing wrong with those images. Well done.

Calling UserID. Zombie thread alert.

Amen.

My, you are a pleasant one.

It is unacceptable.

Fantastic.

Thanks to everyone for the interesting and informative comments.

Grab a camera, any camera, and start taking photographs.

I did. Just got back in.

For the performer physical media - vinyl, then cassettes, then CDs - was a good thing because it represented a revenue stream.

Yep.

Sure. I think that is what we are doing.

Years ago when I was touring I was driving east on I-10 (or was it US 90?) the first week of January. I was going from Pascagoula to Gainesville. These cars full of hooligans kept passing me honking and hollering. I noticed that they all had Mississippi plates. So odd. I get to the motel and later turned the TV on, and Michigan and Mississippi were playing in a bowl game in Gainesville. No wonder they were honking - they saw my Michigan plates. Mystery solved.

You have a bunch of things jumbled together there. Drug abuse is rampant in rural areas, and suicide rates are considerably higher than they are in urban areas. I doubt very much that there are more guns on your street than in my farming county. The percentage of fatherless homes is increasing everywhere, including rural areas. As with most social ills, it hits the poor and minority communities first and the hardest, and as with most social ills it is caused by outside forces, not personal individual failings.

"A substantial body of empirical research has examined implications of a father’s absence on a child’s well-being, indicating evidence to support the following conclusions: (1) contact with a child does not necessarily have positive benefits; (2) economic contributions to a child have positive benefits; (3) interparental cooperation has positive benefits; (4) positive emotional involvement with a child has positive benefits; and (5) an authoritative (rather than either authoritarian, permissive, or uninvolved) parenting style has positive benefits."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/progress-notes/202004/the-effects-absent-fathering-childrens-well-being

Back in the day 40 years ago when I lived in an urban AA neighborhood "everyone knew everyone and would protect themselves and family" and that was a deterrent. That is not just a rural thing, and in many rural areas community and family are breaking down as a consequence of outside forces. Here, the immigrant farm worker families and communities are much stronger than the rural white families and communities, by the way.

I have no idea what you think "fundamentalist Christians" have to do with anything. The entire fundamentalist ad Evangelical movement has become so politicized that it is hard to even see it as having anything to do with Christianity. Meanwhile, the churches are much more central to AA community life than is the case in the larger population, yet those communities are politically on the other side of the divide from the white churches. Obviously, the divide cannot be about Christianity.

On the recidivism and bail reform issue, contrary to the notion that dangerous people are being thrown back on the street we have the opposite problem and it is a shameful a*********n. More than 400,000 people in the U.S. are currently being detained pretrial - mostly poor people and often or petty offenses. Those are people who have not been convicted of a crime yet are languishing in horrific conditions for weeks, months and even years.

Who gets let out again and again? Who escapes consequences for their behavior? Who preys on us? Who does the most damage to society? White collar criminals, that's who.

They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine

The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law

As true today as it was in the 1700's.

Thanks. That's almost a ten bark.

I do try to make it pretty - find the best example, include some of the surroundings for context, add light, compose the frame, etc.