MESSAGE ON THE SIDEWALK ON KANSAS STREET IN NORTH PARK

I have no idea what the message is, but it's obviously meant to communicate specific information. My frame of mind lately has focused my attention on words and symbols and their meanings. Perhaps that's why this arrow and bull's eye got my attention. After I took the picture, and as I rode away on my bicycle, I started to think about election rhetoric and symbolic language and how myths and rumors and outright lies can be made to seem valid and true.

Margaret and I spent some time in Germany earlier this month, and we visited some of the places that were important to Hitler and his Nazi Party. I read again some of his rhetoric and saw again the swastika and the other symbols he used to persuade people to follow him in a truly evil cause. And like sheep, the majority of the people did follow to their ruin and to the death and ruin of millions of innocent people, particularly Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals. I was reminded that good people and good symbols can be put to evil use. The swastika had previously been known as a good luck symbol and was used by various religious groups. Hitler made the Nazi swastika unique to his party by reversing the normal direction of the symbol so that it appeared to spin clockwise. Today, it is widely used, in various incarnations, by neo-nazis, racist skinheads and other white supremacist groups. We saw some of the symbols incorporated in graffiti all over Germany, so Hitler's impact on that country hasn't yet been completely neutralized, and we've all seen the symbols in graffiti splashed across walls and bridges in America. Racism is alive and well in the world in 2008.

Twenty-first century television and the internet are easy, ready tools for use by people who are intent on persuading voters to support a cause that inflicts pain and suffering on classes of people. Sometimes language and symbols are so cleverly incorporated into everyday speech that outright lies are made to seem to be true. Sadly, some Americans, like those Germans hooked into Hitler's dream, are basically good people. I've watched with dismay the television ads that use children to try to persuade people to vote to change the Constitution of California. The ads present blatantly false "information" to instill fear and incite loathing. What can they be thinking (and feeling), those people who are intent on denying civil rights to citizens who are in some way not like them.