Acronym L.I.G.

I took this picture in Sweden approaching the Arctic Circle along side the non-jammed two lane road the summer before last. Sunday morning I made some fixes to the way I actually saw it and present the final here. click big for closer inspection Life is Good as long as the Cartoon on your T-shirt is a bubbly doodle of your 4th grade daughter in Code/Level Orange lock down with the rest of her fellow elementary and high school student body early Friday morning because of an armed robbery that was going down in the real just under 100 yards away at an Ace bank not bank. Yea, Yea I now we try not to think about the extraordinary circumstances of a world unwinding we call now here in the awesome USA but there was an emotional let down realization that I am having trouble dealing with. I guess I just do not remember ever being in lock down code orange with the lights out, teachers receiving audible encrypted messages over the loud speakers, dogs on the campus and the CMPD Snoopy 1 helicopter with optics flying just above the trees out the window. Then again I did not grow up in such a fantastic place to be like the million person ville we call the Queen City either. So far I guess we have been fortunate with crime not eking it's way into her school property, private or not it's all in the same territory and surrounded by the next plastic faux brick link in the network of a downward spiraling society. Oh yea, this is a we pay for school, less than but not by much the past but way more than free of the taxes that we pay 4 times over for. The understanding that my biorerepresentation was forced to deal with it a month in to her 4th grade year really bothers me on a few levels. I mean she and the rest of her class had just started a test that had been issued in the form of a blank flat world map at 8 and a half by 11 on which they had to fill in the continents, the oceans, the compass directions and such with correct spelling. Then the lights went out, Codes over the in school PA system, should the blinds be drawn? No, no need in code orange perhaps in red they will be depending on what they are guarding against. Okay kids please remain calm and just stay quiet for a few minutes we should be getting some more information soon at which time we can be told what to do next. While these kids were simply trying to open their heads to the size of the rest of the world someone a hundred yards away in a strip mall was getting the real education when she or he came to work and was met by a man with a gun and a plan for some free In God We Trust Units. Did the guy with the gun know how to identify the 7 continents with correct spelling, had he ever been off this one and been to another that has people just like here with less code orange anything? Questions seeking answers not, for the openly verbal curiosity is merely the literary rationalization that life is good and good it is, however not particularly at this place and time. Purge you know.

Sorry for leaving it here, sometimes it helps.