A Couple of Thoughts on Words and Pictures

It struck me as I was scrolling through Facebook, despite the ugliness and combativeness of the comments, that there sure are some nice pictures. Smiling people on vacations, a dog with her head out the window, exotic locations around the world, a cat dress up as a shark, a cabin next to a lighthouse, a bit of topiary, a bicycle by a sign for a town with a funny name, good stuff like that. And it struck me that maybe people still like to post nice pictures, and maybe that’s a better medium for expressing all that’s good in the world, and our words mostly get spent on describing all the anxiety, and stress, and fear of the modern world because maybe those are things a picture can’t really describe, but I decided to go through and have a look and and catalog things a bit, nothing really scientific yet, just a basic 2 minute test of the hypothesis, and lo and behold…
I found that there are just as many pictures of ugliness, pictures of war, pictures of horrible politicians, and pictures of just gobs of stuff I either don’t like and am not interested in, and contrariwise, I read some posts which were very positive and encouraging, and in both cases I found things that were somewhere between the two.
There is dark and light, comedy and tragedy, available in every medium. Any message you want.