dissonant

once upon a time, i slept through kyle williams and sally schupack's engagement party.

‘It is a little cruel, Reuven. But that is the way the world is. If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.’
--Chaim Potok, ‘The Chosen’




i promise that this was a celebratory American Spirit, not anything that its shortness would otherwise suggest. i was disappointed not to have taken this earlier in the process...

breakfast.

Once upon a time i woke up in Oklahoma, and then took a nice late-morning stroll back home in Boulder. i was still very excited about my new lens at the time, so i took a lot of close portraits.

These people are nice, and they will be your friends.

a struggle of hypothesis

i keep coming back to this wretched lake.

What proof that they shall grow at all?

Weak, small trees should grow a lot in three years, and it is strange when three years pass without any progress.

'[Amin's] tactics of divide and rule were also extended to the privileged treatment of the top bureaucrats. When "essential commodities" such as soap, sugar, salt, milk, etc. became very scarce, an arrangement was made from the end of 1974 to supply the top bureaucrats with these commodities. Society was graded into status groups. Ministers and top army officers were grade one, University Deans and Permanent Secretaries and Managing Directors of Corporations and Senior Medical Consultants were in grade II, etc.

We prodused passport size photographs which were pasted to special cards supplied by the "Foods and Beverage Dept.". We were entitled to pay on specified days and without struggle and at normal prices, so much rice, so much sugar, etc. per week. The supplies were quite adequate and they included about twenty half litres of milk a week. As time went on I began to feel very uneasy about my privileged treatment. Although a kilogram of sugar used to cost as much as shs. 45-60 (£3-£4) and a half litre of milk was almost one USA dollar, I was still one of those people who were able to pay such prices, but not a wage earner whose monthly pay was shs. 200/- or 300 shillings. His children, I felt, needed milk as much as mine.

One Sunday morning while we were lining up for our 20 or so half litres of milk, I quietly said to my colleague, a professor in the Medical School that I was developing a "socialist conscience". Speaking to him quietly so that the man standing in line with us did not hear, Professor John (not his real name), perhaps realistically told me not to worry about the arrangement. He said, "In any society it is the 5% which matters. Amin knows that once that 5% is not satisfied, no government can function.." We never developed the subject any further. Perhaps he was joking. But if he was not, his attitude demonstrated how Amin had succeeded in keeping a small fraction of the population happy and consequently unconcerned with the appalling suffering of the rest of the country."
--Semakula Kiwanuka, "Amin and the Tragedy of Uganda"