Yesterday we viewed from curbside the Geneva Swedish Days parade.  I have enjoyed a good parade as long as I can remember, the magic, the exuberance of seeing and being seen.  A parade is a meaningful social ritual, in a secular time is it not?

I took photographs using my iphone 13 camera.

However, several “dark notes” yet haunt me. 

A dissonant ground-tone of discomfort bothers me when viewing a parade of late, especially a midsummer parade proximate to the Independence Day holiday.  I know the tradition and I understand it.  Yet is it wise to begin a parade, by having old men, the veterans, and young men marching, establishing a dominant note with parade-ground rifles, banners flying, etc. appearing to embellish war as a societal prime value?  Let us honor those who served. May we perhaps “save the best for the last” the concluding parade segment, — a sorrowful confession that sacrifice is sometimes necessary?

Second, the marching, grinning, glad-handing candidates for office discomfited me.  Am I to be inclined to cast my ballot for a candidate for public office because a campaign worker handed me a red T-shirt as the candidate and his retinue passed by in the parade?  What does the candidate think; does he or she think? 

Before some photos, this quotation from a well known photographer:

I attempt, through much of my work, to animate all things
–even so called “inanimate’ objects – with the spirit of man.
I have come, by degrees, to realize
this extremely animistic projection rises, ultimately,
from my profound fear and disquiet over the accelerating mechanization of man’s life; and the resulting attempts to stamp out individuality in all spheres of man’s activity – this whole process
being one of the dominant expressions of our military-industrial society…

The creative photographer sets free the human contents of objects;
and imparts humanity
to the inhuman world around him.

–Clarence John Laughlin (1905-1985) American photographer best known for his surrealist photographs of the American South.