Every time we take a road trip, my husband asks me to take photos of the windmills we pass on the way. "C'mon, just one really good shot," he says. I comply reluctantly saying, "How many pictures of windmills can a person take?" I complain because they all look the same and my limited gifts of photography make it hard to capture how majestic they are; those tall sentinels of the fields. For example, the first photograph here is in Colorado last year, the second in Iowa this weekend:
As we drove, I pondered the ways in which the unchanging, stoic farmland belies the deep ideological division in my adopted country. I tried to imagine the social media landscape imposed on the physical world: the political cartoons with hundreds of comments full of righteous indignation, anger and even hatred spewing back and forth in shrill, locked caps. While the windmills circle in silent witness, the internet is a noisy inferno, as we tear each other apart mercilessly for our differing beliefs. When my husband tells me that we're in Iowa, the first word I think of is "caucus" and I Google to find out if it is a "blue" or "red" state.
To my surprise as we were driving home this weekend, I saw on my Facebook feed that artist Shepard Fairey had posted his own patriotic image, called "Power Up Windmill":
He wrote on his website: "I believe very strongly that green energy is the only way for the United States to achieve energy independence, create valuable technology, and protect the environment. I created this windmill image as a patriotic symbol of the green energy mission."
It was a small coincidence that seemed timely. Questions about how we will resolve the problems in the environment are coming to the forefront. No matter what our political affiliation, we take our kids to school and go grocery shopping together side by side. We all say that we want the best possible future for our children, but in all this rolling, open land we adults cannot seem to find one square inch of common ground to stand upon. What progress can be made in a country where some people don't believe in the science behind climate change and continue to deny global warming? I take pictures of the world in the fading light, trying to interpret the story of the American landscape through my camera lens, and to find some comfort in the beauty of the sunset:
