On April 18, 2006, San Francisco will mark the centennial of the San Francisco earthquake and fire, an event that destroyed the city. The number of people killed has never been more than estimated. The other loses of various kinds was found with what is now billions of dollars.
On that first day this photo was taken from the Hotel San Francisco, showing the city in flames. Less than 24 hours later, the San Francisco also have been emptied.
Behind the crumbling facade of human invention was a man with an active mind, analytical. A man who would take action to change what others refused to see because of those tragic days. Arthur C. Pillsbury could capture on film a life-changing lesson of all. The sound and vision of a burning city was awakened to a human truth.
The accompanying photo went worldwide, leading to the magnitude of the event to human eyes. As catastrophic as the event was that fades into nothing compared with the spectrum that we face today from our own government.
Some disasters are natural, some occur because we do not understand. The San Francisco earthquake and fire was an event that began as a natural disaster. The plates of the earth slipped, readjusting themselves and for the hundreds of miles the resulting impact is felt. But the devastation and loss of passing the limits of what is natural, multiplied by the corrupt government of San Francisco.
San Francisco did not have a disaster plan because the corrupt city administration was more interested in continuing corruption and enjoying the privileges that come with power. Emergency workers were not trained, the preparations that had long been called for had never been enacted. Many of the buildings to create firebreaks flown just burst into flames, the spread of the conflagration and destruction. Both looters and innocents were shot dead by the military contingent that would never be held accountable. Corrupt officials also evaded responsibility. Accountability is something the government learned to avoid from the beginning.
San Francisco survived. Eventually sanity returned and the people came together to rebuild. Sometimes, even in the face of completely incompetent care in the patient's life. The above image was taken by Arthur C. Pillsbury on the first day. It was a day that changed the focus of his life.
Pillsbury had just left his job as a photojournalist at the San Francisco Examiner to start his own photography business, the Pillsbury Picture Company, a month before. For the next few weeks captured the immediacy of the events that people struggled to survive and save what they could from the flames that consumed. Its ease of development, located in Oakland, was the only one running. Orders came from all over the world.
Later that year, used the profits from the photos of San Francisco to achieve a long-term and bought the study of the three arrows in Yosemite.
Pillsbury was an engineer who specialized in mechanical engineering from Stanford University had invented a machine to cut samples for the microscope and circuit panoramic camera before leaving college. He was not the kind of person to make do with systems and tools that did not work as expected. In Yosemite was found with other systems that were not to do their job.
The cavalry, then in charge of the Park, had long been a practice of cutting grasslands to provide forage for their horses. Pillsbury realized that the number of species of wild flowers was decreasing every year in these areas and also that the cavalry was not worried. Therefore, the application of their skills as an inventor who built the first span of the camera to be used with plants producing the movement of the image first image of a wild flower grace lift his head to the sun. As had been showing and narrating nature films for two years.
Now the wild flowers could speak for themselves.
That first period of time the film was made to convince those who have the power to do the right thing and stop the cut and move toward conservation.
Arthur C. Pillsbury believes that all people need is the truth. If you saw the reality, in his opinion, they will choose to do the right thing voluntarily. He was right most of the people, most of the time.
After seeing the film in power left the court the same day. The year was 1912. Most of us do things well if we know what it is. But sometimes doing the right thing is not an error, sometimes there is no other agenda. Pillsbury means that when those in power must be wrong or lack of understanding or simply be too lazy to care. Those were the options that made sense for him, but it was an incomplete understanding. When those in power are acting on another agenda that can not change the truth.
Pillsbury took the photo to see here, one of hundreds, shows both the power of nature unleashed in the city and the power of corruption by the government without control. Most people do not understand the risks faced after officer working for the city government.
Pillsbury learned a fundamental lesson of what you observed. He decided to make sure that the people had direct access to the information they needed. In 1912 he invented the time-lapse camera to connect people in the world of wildflowers, which had been overlooked even by conservationists like John Muir. Muir energies are focused on Hetch Hetchy save a lost battle.
Pillsbury continued to work. He began to teach and showcase your images in motion. With time going to speak in all forums and all major city universities of note, including MIT. He expanded his lectures every year, adding new movies and views. I was determined that the miracles of nature means that their truth is accessible to all. In 1927 Arthur Pillsbury completed the invention of the microscopic motion picture camera. See the world beyond the reach of people that the human eye awakens to another aspect of nature. After that time there was an explosion in research related.
Pillsbury went to build the first X-ray camera film and motion picture camera under the water by opening new prospects. Pillsbury refused to patent their inventions. He wanted to use to become common to us all. Had solved the problem identified during those terrible days in San Francisco burned.
Arthur C. Pillsbury died in Oakland in 1946. The scope of human vision had expanded, thanks to his inventions and tireless conferences. I had done the natural world, as it had never been before, but that was not enough. He had not calculated the impact of greedy for money and power. Government has not changed, but continued an upward trend with control corruption. Those who benefited through generations came to accept as their right. We need to see the government for what it is, a system that has become a service provider to the source of wealth for those who control it.
Disaster is endemic in all policy and for the same reasons. The coupling of a lack of responsibility to the temptation to always attracts those inclined to steal.
Katrina has shown how bad it can be within our own shores, Iraq has shown how badly the U.S. can be when corruption tools are applied internationally. These are examples of incompetence, but illustrate sophisticated schemes for the conversion of government institutions into profit centers for those who hold power.
Efficient Government is doing exactly what power wants to do.
Our founders did not expect this government 20 years ago. They felt that the government was established as a model species in need of beta testing, hoping that operate within a defined set of principles and limitations.
Government is not supposed to do all we can do ourselves. In the Bill of Rights 9 and 10 make that clear. So why the government increasingly taking jobs are handled in private?
For the same reason bank robbers rob banks. That's where the money is. We're used to the idea that we can examine the change of government and the tools we use to accomplish what we want. However, this right is our ever you choose, as reflected in the Declaration of Independence.
The current state of government, have shocked our founders.
Please note that life seemed to the founders at the end of that century.
Our founders lived and died in a world of small business owners, farmers and artisans. Households and businesses provide their own needs. The innovation comes with its own rewards and challenges and people learned to see what worked and what did not. This is the classic form of transmission of human wisdom, used even by chimpanzees, without government intervention.
The tools for the government of the founders together is a population which controlled most of the infrastructure directly through the city government and the power of people to buy. Corporations that do not exist in its current form. Our founders could not see the consequences of allowing the legislation that led to the actions of individuals under government control. They were imperfect as we all are. Do not hand us a finished product, but needed to be tested and repaired.
But some things they did well.
Until the late nineteenth century all the school children studied the Bill of Rights and read the Federalist Papers. They knew, therefore, what their rights should be. Understanding the operating principles, as we see, is a critical factor. When people know that it is much more difficult to deceive. But politicians were persistent. They had much to gain.
Katrina shows a lot of things the government today. It took a week from the time the storm hit to announce plans for redevelopment, people are still waiting for relief, but "gentrification" of the area as planned. Today's families have tried to return have been denied access to their homes and property. If you look at what those in power do, instead of believing the rhetoric of truth is filtered through. Government through taxes consumed resources that should have protected New Orleans.
What has been shown is that Americans have been better to keep the money from FEMA within local areas to support local emergency services. Because each level of government above the premises was more corrupt in New Orleans last year there were none of the residents watch and wait they believed they had paid. These funds went to the pockets of others. Big government did not exist because people could not figure out how to deal with their problems as the country grew and the increasing complexity of their society. It came into existence because the rulers were greedy and the citizens were too confident and did not understand that the government is just a hiring hall services, that knowledge had been withdrawn.
So what can we do to clean this mess?
His system has been designed to create our continued dependence and inescapable. We can change that.
Get off the Grids - there are plenty of them and include energy, oil, credit, monetary morass, our health needs and so on. The good news is that this can be done. The means are there, waiting for our use. Despite persistent and tortuous attempts to keep us stuck in place human innovation has made available and accessible exits.
This is probably hard to believe, but true. The depth and extent of human innovation and our ability to work together to resolve problems that destroy the species less. That brings us to a world that would have made more sense to our founders, one where the community and awareness are essential.
Organize locally - Many of the tools of organization we need already exist and have existed for generations. The original plan was built on the idea of communities working together to ensure that their needs were met. In the past 200 years Americans have learned to work together locally. You can apply these skills to new tasks.
Most of us spend much more time working in Little League, Lions, Elks, Rotary, Soroptomists, churches and other groups that spend the time doing the good we do pay attention to the government anyway. This is often criticized as a cause of the problem. In fact, shows that most of us know what really matters to vote with our own time and resources when faced with the morass of government.
The same organizations that help homeless people, locally funded and staff volunteers can carry out other tasks we need to do to ensure the continuity of social safety nets we all want in place.
Coalition Building - When you look at the confidence and strength that comes with the team mentality of politics one must ask what was in the first place. Persons registered as Democrats, Republicans, Green, or Libertarian who focus on making their communities better have more in common among themselves than with those in positions of power within political parties. All politicians, with only exceptions enough to prove the point, are more committed to the empowerment and cash in the elimination of the means by which power and accumulate cash.
The San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed the lives, property destroyed, and raised a challenge to the people of San Francisco they had heard and answered. We have to remember that. Today's challenge is much greater, but despite the depredations of government and its electoral base, mega corporations, we have many more resources to face the battle that made by our founders. Generations of American innovation is there, like a bank account large and untapped, ready to work.
The greedy you know what the real game. That has been happening for a long time. The rest of us need to make sure that busy alternatives are available. Once you see the emperor's new clothes, there is no turning back.
The natural disasters of the kind occurs. But we need not accept the human government as an act of God, we can change course.
The American Revolution has taken a break. Ours began in 1775 with the shot heard round the world on April 19 .. That revolution, designed to replace the government of the monarchy by the government through the tools chosen and controlled directly by the people, not yet finished.
We, the people retain the right to change the government to secure our rights are inherent and together, overcoming the chasms that divide us, it can be. That was the original vision of the United States. It's time to finish what he started to well intentioned.