By Douglas Imbrogno | november5.2024 | I have posted a lot of serious stuff about the all-hands-on-deck 2024 national election in America. These have included videos, songs, cartoons, limericks, and memes. Today's video, 'CLOSING ARGUMENT,' is not quite an argument in the conventional sense. Yet, in the form of a video/poem/black-and-white slideshow and meditation, it argues for and encourages us to be kind to one another as well as to ourselves, whatever the results of this critical national referendum. And to attend to our spiritual lives after the tumult, trauma, and — let's be honest — the terror of this election season. I appreciate how Tom Nichols put it on Twitter/X on this day of national voting — Nov. 5, 2024:
‘DO JUSTLY NOW’
And maybe, for right now, for this very second, let's all take a breath. I hope that the video above offers a few more breaths and some guiding thoughts for the days, months, and years ahead. We might also turn to some timeless words from The Talmud, when facing — and maybe feeling overwhelmed — in navigating the course ahead for America’s ship of state with all our family and friends on board. And in healing the stark divide and deep wounds that Donald Trump and his siloed-off followers have revealed and encouraged in families, communites, and states, from north to south and east to west.
And, too, here are a few key still images from the video worth pausing over and pondering as we move forward:
THE ROYAL TREATMENT
After this crazed election season, and after too many years of studying how to communicate and build audiences via video, documentary, and still imagery online, while stomping around the often mucky swamplands of social media, I am retreating. My garret calls, where my cranky, itinerant Muses have been flitting in and out for years, wondering when we were going to get serious about my original wheelhouse.
That is to say, longform writing. Thus, my Muse Crew has set up a metaphorical Royal typewriter in our atelier. They have purchased some really good Italian espresso beans from Milan to go with our Milanese cappuccino machine beside our wrting desk. And the door, I see from where I sit, is open.
FOLLOW MY WORK: thestoryisthething.substack.com
So, that is where I am headed. I will be backing off from way too much time spent as an unpaid campesino, toiling amid the great content farms of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X and beyond for The Man (especially since that often questionable guy is named Zuckerberg, Musk, and a few other billionare ne’er-do-wells, tweaking algorithms and earning billions by the week behind the scenes). If you’d like to see — and, more importantly, to read — what results, free subscribe to my main writing and imagery site’s substack newsletter: thestoryisthething.substack.com.
I leave you with one last thing. It is something my dear soulmate, Stephen Dowdall, said (watch for him in the writing-to-come from my garret as the character of ‘Edwin’). This was before he passed on some years ago, far too soon from this mortal coil, dancing off into the beyond of the beyond. May I — may you, may we — take these words as a North Star after the election of 2024:
‘Look out for one another.’
Peace outwards.
Douglas John Imbrogno
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