AN/FPS-24 Radar Tower, Mt. Umunhum, Los Gatos, CA, 2024.
Several additional pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/53796724938
#photography
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
15 points (94.1% liked)
Photography
0 readers
10 users here now
All things photography. Share your own original photos, your questions, your inspiration.
Rules
Share your own original photography. No NSFW images. Be Nice.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have mixed feelings about these cold war relics. On the one hand, they're artifacts of what was perhaps humanity's most dangerous folly to date, locking the world in a deadly game where the stakes only went up with each round. This doesn't seem like something to commemorate or celebrate.
On the other hand, these objects, many now destroyed or decayed, serve as visible evidence of just how close to oblivion we are willing to go. And looked at from the right angle, they have stories to tell.
@[email protected] I lived through that era, telling younger friends about it now there is a disconnect as it is abstract. At least these relics make it real for them, maybe (hopefully) making some of my current paranoia and political “take” seem slightly more, well, justified.
@[email protected] It now seems hard to believe that for the first 50% of my life I lived with an entirely rational background fear that all of civilization might end at any moment with less than 30 minutes notice, possibly by accident.
I lack the vocabulary to describe it adequately.
@[email protected] @[email protected] I’ve been wondering if active shooter drills are the duck and cover for later American generations. A repetitive drill focused on possible imminent death. I can’t imagine that anyone comes out of that unchanged.
@[email protected] @[email protected] In many ways the active shooter drills seem worse. Duck and cover was about the random threat of total annihilation at the hands of impersonal, out of control global powers. The shooter drills are about the random threat of personal annihilation at the hands of your neighbor.
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Reminder: your neighbour was radicalised and manipulated by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube algorithms pushed by McKenzie consultants and the top brass of tech companies for profit and an ideological agenda (and Fox News, OANN, etc.) and an automatic weapon was put in his hands by Republican legislators, the NRA and the Supreme Court.
The radicalised, racist, bigoted ideology behind the trigger was pushed and riled up by political representatives and their sponsors.
There is responsibility to be assigned, this didn't spawn in a vacuum.