In early March of 2003, I was shooting an album cover near a quaint Long Island Railroad station. The hot musician friend of mine looked great against the rails and the old fashioned depot. I took a lot of shots there. A few trains came by and we moved back. Suddenly we were met by several police cars who surrounded us. They asked us what we were doing. Uh duh. I was standing there with a camera and my friend was standing there with a guitar case and I was obviously taking a picture of him at the station. WTF does it look like, officer?
We were then informed by the officers, who took our ID's, filed reports about us, then called the FBI, CIA and local police, and ran checks to see if we had any priors, that we must get permission to take pictures at any public property. huh? I politely asked why? We were told that this is almost war time. Mind you, dickwad in chief hadn't even declared war yet. I politely asked what that had to do with taking a picture of someone at a train station. The cops said that I could be a terrorist taking pictures of the tracks in order to plant an explosive device. ohhhh! I see. Now mind you, I was out in East Armpit, Long Island and this would be the last place on the planet any terrorist would think of making any impact. If a terrorist set off an explosion there, the rest of the world would say, "So?" but I digress...
We waited.. the FBI called back and told the cops to let us go. By the way, my friend and I are both blonde. He has blue eyes, I have green. We look Scandinavian. Yah. Not your average terrorists.
So about a few days later, free from my nightmare of police interrogation, the idiot in chief declared war on Iraq and I curled up into my mandatory fetal position and withdrew from society. I had no one to talk to at all about it who would understand me or take me seriously, there was nothing on the news that supported my opinion that this was wrong, there was nothing in the paper that was contrary to Bush's opinion that this was the right thing to do. I seemed to be the only person on earth that I knew who knew that the whole damn thing was 100% bogus. I was more terrified when the war in Iraq started than I was when we were attacked here in NY on 9/11 because I saw greater repercussions. I didn't know where to go online at the time either to find solace and solidarity.
Many people I knew watched the bombing of Baghdad on TV and told me I was crazy to think that we would ever need more troops or that there was a chance we would ever need to draft anyone to fight the war. They all said it would be over in a snap. The conservative folks were complaining about the "liberal" media to me. I couldn't understand how they could call it that when the media was 100% complicit with the war and Bush's ideology all along. George Bush certainly wasn't liberal. I swore I was living in Russia during the cold war. Where was my Radio Free Europe?
One Saturday night last spring, while I was plopped on the couch barely able to move my fingers to change the channels, I flipped onto CSpan and there it was, a dream come true... an anti war rally in DC. I wasn't crazy afterall. There were people like me. I watched speeches by intelligent famous people who said exactly what I was thinking. I jotted down website URL's as they came up on the screen too. I was brought to tears. No lie. After it was over, the programming went back to the horror and the Nazi propaganda of the Bush Cartel. Yet for a brief moment in time, I saw sanity on the television and I felt good there.
Well if you read that whole stream of consciousness thing above, Goddess bless you.. I was getting to this piece: Think Again: 'You Call this 'Liberal?'' - Center for American Progress by Eric Alterman.
PS I have to dig up pics from a photo shoot I did at an abandoned insane asylum on Long Island. I was shooting a very young rock band there. It was haunted. I kid you not. I have pictures of ectoplasm. We met up with some funky security guards there too and ghosts who didn't want us there. Oh the joys of photography.
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