Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Sad State of Affairs

by Peggy Drinkard

Since I teach children, I frequently do on-line image searches for photos or pictures related to what I’m teaching. It’s always interesting to see what you come up with, because not only displayed are literal images of what you’ve typed in, but a whole host of “related” images. Sometimes I get annoyed because almost ALL I can find are images with some very loose association or no association that I can see, and occasionally NO images of what I’m really looking for. For example, if you search something seemingly straightforward like “rain” or “water”, you will get images of a sad earth with a teardrop or something similar declaring a green message about water, but just rain? You have to really search long and hard for that. Today I wanted to find an image of three crosses on a hill, so I typed in “crucifixion”. I think there were 32 pages or more of images to browse through under “crucifixion.” Notable among them were photos of Mel Gibson, (o.k., o.k, I get it) and Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton? Oh, and Madonna. There were some fine arts images…several Salvador Dali images of Christ on the cross, but I was looking more for Giotto…or Rembrandt… David….Michelangelo, Leonardo, Carravagio,etc. , and of these there were too few. Now, I know how to dig and ferret for what I want, and eventually I usually find it. But why do I have to wade through all that twaddle to get to it? I consider the fact that I have to a very sad state of affairs.