by Adrian Daniel Schramm | Feb 21, 2022 | Conversations With Demons
Long lines of buses pull up along skyscrapers downtown. The 63, the 54, the 74, the 71, the 21. Coughing coal black on the street and spitting people out onto the curb and swallowing more. We stand beneath the lights of the bus station that stay on even during the day. These are hybrid buses with pictures of blue earth drawn on the side expected to save the environment from their smog. We are told that buses are better than driving – for the environment, for the cityscape, bravo for public transportation! But we wish silently that we could live in (or live through) the clean and happy future we were promised would be coming soon. Buses are all we get for now. The noise of morning traffic rises with the clamor of construction, of car horns, radios playing news and music and the voices of those who sing along. The screech of brakes, the rattle of hubcaps, the cell phones and police sirens. Someone yells good morning! to a friend across the street. Humans of the future will look back on this primitive time and laugh. They will look back at our violence, our pollution, our noise, our wage slaves and their love of work. They will laugh at us forced to live these primitive lives. Or they will pity us, perhaps, if they are generous. It is our mission then not to be cynical or complain, but to record a message of hope and hopefulness, a scribe of optimism or what the old folks called idealism before it died long ago. So when people look back at...
by Adrian Daniel Schramm | Nov 16, 2017 | Conversations With Demons
Raised after the fall of the Berlin Wall and USSR collapse, my relationship to a divided Germany, and of the war that led to it, was a tangential one.
