Heading out to shoot this photo, NPR was covering the results of the Nevada Democratic caucuses as they came in, while looking forward to South Carolina next Saturday and then Super Tuesday on March 3rd, which may well determine who will challenge Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential Election. In many ways, it’s a remarkably normal political story, strangely out of step with the far-from-normal world we find ourselves in.
In the last two weeks, the President issued pardons and commutations to a variety of convicted criminals whose families or friends gave money to his campaign, fired the Acting Director of National Intelligence for backing a subordinate who briefed the House Intelligence Committee about interference in the 2020 election, replacing him with a man known primarily for his loyalty to the President. He has also openly attacked the judge overseeing the sentencing of his long time political advisor for the crime of lying to Congress, as well as the foreperson of the jury that voted to convict in the same case. At the National Prayer Breakfast, the President threatened revenge on those who brought the impeachment case against him, in which he was recently acquitted. Alexander Vindman, who testified under subpoena in that impeachment case was marched out of his office. He was reassigned for his disloyalty and far more concerning, so was his brother, who played no role whatsoever in the impeachment save being related to a witness. Six more nations have also been added to the “travel ban” policy.
Winter Wind Photography is my photography business and on an objective level, it’s bad business for me to express my political views here. I could argue that my blogging background being in the political arena makes it tough to avoid politics leaking in here from time to time.
But I’m not going to make that argument.
Yes, Winter Wind Photography is a photography business, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I, the principal photographer for WWP, am a disabled gay man who belongs to a minority faith. A significant proportion of Winter Wind Photography’s clients are fellow members of the LGBTQ community. Winter Wind’s sister imprint, Bevel-Up Photography, works primarily with people who are entrenched in the alternative sexuality lifestyle.
Politics is not only personal to me, it is also important to Winter Wind’s existence.
Our current administration has been remarkably hostile in policy to the LGBTQ community, and rhetorically hostile to people who don’t fit within a narrow spectrum of white, upper middle class, Christian religious identity. Moreover, the last four years has seen the shattering of the customs and traditions that served as checks on executive power with varying degrees of success since adoption of the United States Constitution two hundred and thirty two years ago.
As we move forward through the motions of the 2020 campaign, this nation, and the entire world, is speeding onward into a remarkably unknowable future. This is a future with fewer guardrails, and myriad warnings echoing through history that we have been thus far, unwilling or unable to heed. I can only hope as we journey onward into the rest of this year, and the election, that this feeling of hurtling out of control into the abyss goes away. I am not, however, holding my breath.