You can't restore something that didn't exist-

[Bluerthanblue]

As my youngest son heads off to 11th grade,
the only black student in our small town High School, I'm reminded of this:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_W96UtHhsxGA/S_KR-swmAuI/AAAAAAAAAdk/s7kZKhMq1F0/s1600/Norman+Rockwell,+the+Problem+we+all+live+with.jpg

Beneath the flags and the jingoism there's a story that isn't so 'feel-good'.

In my opinion what America needs is to be encouraged to "live with honor"- to move forward with purpose, instead of looking backward with blinders, romanticizing a past that just isn't that simple or 'good'.

I stumbled across an interesting site looking for a link to this picture. :

......"We are surprised because Rockwell's style of liberal populism, to go by the mainstream narrative, seems a contradiction. Narrow-minded jingoism has, often falsely, become associated with rural America by just about all sides of the political debate, whether they endorse it as the true face of the country or turn up their noses dismissively. Both reactions, for different reasons, are disgusting.

So Rockwell's most powerful work seems now the gospels of a particularly faded variety of American Dream. And it was a dream, that much is clear, but it had its accomplishments. It is hard not to regret the day it lifted, or veered into nightmare.

One final piece of Rockwell's sticks with me. It is his 1961 representation of the Golden Rule, including his usual farmer figures standing alongside an array of races and religions. Some of the faces are hardened, old with poverty or work, staring ahead as if to remind us that Rockwell carefully dubbed his freedoms human, not American, and those who violate them do so at their own risk."


http://thebreakingtime.typepad.com/the_breaking_time/2010/02/the-other-side-of-norman-rockwell.html

[JuniperLea]

1. My mom gave me this book when I was 10 or so...

I cried through most of it. I'm always reminded of this book when I see that picture.

[Brickbat]

2. What many of us miss about the "good old days" was not the problems that were there (Jim Crow,

oppression of women, and so on), but the fight that people were bringing to those wrongs.

I love Norman Rockwell's work, even his cheesy stuff. But people rarely think about the political stuff he did: