A big Douglas fir fell across Panther Creek, Washington, living on as a bridge.
This themed post is for the WPC challenge – Bridges. Even though the images here are of bridges made for our feet or the bicycles we ride to pass over them, I was inspired to post this because of one simple, obvious fact of life today. We are too separate as a people. Perhaps technology is partly to blame. Perhaps it is the nature of our modern society or simply our huge numbers. Whatever the underlying cause, something has made us distrust each other. We are in desperate need of reconnection.
Being estranged from each other, as so many of us seem to be, is like being estranged from our families. It is self-destructive. It prevents us from creating solutions to the problems we face. It creates an unhappiness that comes from isolation. We need bridges to bring us back together, back into the family of humanity.
A bridge for strollers in one of Portland, Oregon’s many parks.
The so-called leaders we choose (and who are chosen for us) are too self-serving to avoid the temptation to stoke the separateness that creates distrust, tribalism and fear. They are somehow misled into believing that the ends justifies the means, that appealing in vanity to dark emotions in order to gain or retain positions of power, is somehow worthwhile.
Of course the ends, however positively they’re imagined, are never justified by such means. There is nothing positive that such men (they’re mostly men) can do with that power. They cannot be true leaders or create a legacy that will be admired by future generations. They can only make things worse.
A trail in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge crosses a footbridge in a verdant canyon.
A covered bridge originally built for horse-drawn wagons: historic Bollinger Mill, Missouri.
But there are many people out there, young and old, who want to rebuild the bridges that have been dismantled. And many more who are not aware that helping in this effort is really what they want to do. It would make their lives worthwhile. If we want to make not just America but the world great again we must not only rebuild the bridges, we must leave the “us vs. them” mentality in the past. We must invite “them” to walk over the bridge we build and meet “us” in the middle.
Will you join in and begin to build bridges? Enjoy the images and have a great week!
A huge downed redwood tree acts as a bridge, allowing easy passage above the tangled undergrowth of Redwood National Park, California.
A spiral bike bridge along Portland’s Willamette River.
