Friday, June 24, 2005 from Cohutta

I belong to an online photo site called Flickr. People post photographs that they’ve taken and if the photographer sets it up this way (and most do) others can comment on them. There are different interest groups: Too Sexy for My Hair (a group for people receiving chemo treatment for cancer), Watergarden Wonderland, Just Ferns, The Secret Life of Plants, Naked Self, Flower Power...wait a minute...did I say Naked Self?

The few groups that might include pictures of nakedness have caught the eye of religious fundamentalists in the United Arab Emirates. So they did what fundamentalists do: they banned the site from the country.

In Flickr, contacts are made and often friendships are formed from what might start out as comments on photos (great composition and clarity, you really have a good eye for color, etc.). There are people I may drop little notes to from New Jersey to New Zealand. I’ve shed real tears for the folks in Too Sexy for My Hair and Pet Cemetery. I’ve laughed at some of the submissions to I Ate This and Who Let the Dogs Out? I’ve marveled over photos of our beautiful world in Catchy Colors, Flora and Fauna, and My Backyard, but none of this will leak in or out of the U.A.E. What a loss to us all! Will the people of the U.A.E. be better for this?

We have our own homegrown fundamentalists here in the U.S.; they’re called Evangelicals if they’re religious, Nazis or Klan members if they’re political or social. They’re represented by various people, some mainstream like Falwell, Robertson and often the President of the United States, some underground that we don’t hear about until a light is shined on them like McVeigh and Rudolph. Wouldn’t they love to ban everything that that they think is evil? God knows they try. Though they would tell you differently, THEY ARE WHAT IS WRONG WITH AMERICA; THEY ARE WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD.