Blame it on Rio

OK, fan club of tens here is my next installment. As many of you know I have traveled a fair bit in my life, and some of the posts coming up will be reporting on some of the more amazing things that I've seen in my ramblings.

Perspective is one of the philosophical ideas that keep me grounded. See the mountain from the valley, and you only have half of the picture. You must also see the valley from the mountain. This essay is on the surface about perspective.


On the surface, some things seem small, inconsequential even unnoticeable amid the thousands of similar objects to which they may be compared. You can look at something and only see part of the picture. You might not even have a clue to what it is you are looking at until you are able to get enough of a picture to grasp how big a problem is or how difficult a solution may be to solve such a problem.


Often issues seem to be black and white, simple enough to grok. Easy for the left to understand, easy for the right. How do you increase employment so that health care cost is lessened relative to income?
How do you get people to work with not much money to pay them?




As you can see in the above 3 pictures a perspective is beginning to emerge. You now have in your mind an idea of the size of the stones on which the knife is sitting. You know the size of the knife relative to the coins in your own pocket. What can we do with a big pile of little stones if we set our collective minds to it?



You could put many people to work for many years to create "The Wave" on the Promenade on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This task employed hundreds for years. It was not a glamor job, it didn't pay well, but in terms of creating a lasting work of art that anyone can enjoy, it is unsurpassed as a public works project. Lest you loose your perspective here, This beach is about 4 miles long. There is a median strip the entire length of the beach, and then a very wide sidewalk fronting hotels and businesses for the entire distance to the vanishing point.



The wave is just the beach side part of this artwork. The rest is geometric patterns that may have required some mind altering yerba máte or a good stiff cachaça to reach it's max potential.
Perspective is the only way we are going to solve the existing health care issue in this country. We need to keep moving back away from the issue until it becomes clear how big of an issue we are really facing.



Solutions can be black and white if you have a pile of each and lay them down one at a time. In case you think this is a one shot deal, Ipanema Beach also sports this style of hand laid mosaic. I am amazed that a society that could have just paved this strip of land and been done with it chose to invest in an art form so massive it employed many people for a long time. This is a public service.