Mission Statement, Revisited.

I’m quitting my job. I’m moving into my car. I’m driving around the country alone. And I’m not lazy.

I’m not just doing this because I like taking pictures. I’m not doing this to get away from my boyfriend or my family. I’m not trying to shun responsibility.

My responsibility lies within the ability to focus on the life within the people that I meet. My job is to absorb. This society has slipped into a dangerous rut of cultural ketosis, absorbing nothing and allowing any knowledge to simply pass through, unwanted and wasted. Youth is squandered on couches and in front of computer screens, while middle age is spent scrambling to make ends meet in the land of prescription drugs and three-dollar gas. We pop pills like band-aids on bullet holes and wonder why we still bleed. We buy out farms to build McMansions with no yards, as though being able to lean out one’s window and touch a neighbor’s house is an amenity. Disney makes a movie about animals being squeezed out of their habitats by big-name construction and they market it at Wal-Mart. Irony is lost on sheep.

Yet it’s no wonder we discard intelligence when we are forced to merely eke by at the hands of a government that has doled out nothing but sophistry and cares more about protecting the rights of frozen embryos than children dying in the streets from hunger or violence. Rich people can buy hybrid cars to escape fuel prices but the poor still drive their lemons, uninsured, and barely make it to the gas station. Wal-Mart grows because it’s all most can afford, and even those that work there are below the poverty level. Hot dogs are cheaper than vegetables, so when the food budget goes to Little Billy’s Ritalin, the whole family gets fatter. Parent’s good consciences are tested as their young sons peddle drugs from the front stoop – at least it’s money coming in. And what is left at the end of the exhausting day but the sweet soma of sitcoms?

There’s more to America than this, anyone who looks closely enough can see that. Hidden by shame and sadness, the eternal pursuit of the dying American dream, the country itself is alive and rumbling just below the surface. It’s my job to be that microscope, the literary bullhorn that shouts at the sky, “We’re still here! We’re more than the sum of our parts! We’re more than what you see on MTV!” The underbelly of America is exposed for all to see, it’s in the White House and on Fox News. What’s not as evident is the good stuff. My responsibility to my country is to wipe away the orange dust of Doritos, listen, absorb and tell the stories of its people.