rose

i like shadows and when rays of sun peak through and fight to be seen.

i like sunsets, and sunrises, and when the moon is so big it blows your mind, or even when it’s a small perfect crescent.

i like the roar of a crowd singing along to their favorite song as their favorite band runs around on stage rocking out to their music.

i like people’s real smiles, the smile they can’t hold back when they’re trying to keep a secret or when they’re about to burst out laughing or when they’re just too happy/excited/content to suppress it.

i like the relationships i have with my family and that they will love and support me no matter what. 

i like flowers and i like trees and i love seeing flowers and trees in places like cities or homes or places they’re not usually seen.

i like buildings with vines growing on them and massive skyscrapers because you can look at them and wonder how long it’s been there or think wow that’s so huge how many people did it take to build that?

i like watching the ocean, from every angle, on the beach with sand between my toes to overlooking it all when driving by from the cliffs. 

i like when my friends say “oh you’d love to hear this!” when they’re about to tell me something awesome. 

i like talking to people, really talking to people, about what their passionate about and sharing what i’m passionate about and getting to know them based on what’s deep inside them. 

i like long drives at night and looking up to see a sky full of stars that i can stare at for hours. 

The internet has become nothing more than a reflection of what you, personally, wish to process the world as. Whether you’ve been talked into believing that America is being ‘stolen by illegal immigrants who are taking all the jobs’ or that ‘Russian-brainwashed nazis and racists have seized control of power’, it’s essentially a load of garbage that has been successful in its purpose of riling you up.

CNN and Fox News are the same. Breitbart and Mic are the same. They create narratives in easily digestible and selectively factual news pieces, and then make money off of your anger and disdain. It’s nothing new. Frankly, people should’ve smartened up to realize this by now. However the rise of Trump has only strengthened every network and outlet that operates in this manner and has encouraged now formerly respectable publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post to conduct themselves in similar ways, in reporting with bias. Even after cashing in their reliability, it seems that the only lesson learned is that fear mongering gets you attention and a fat paycheck.

Between the social media algorithms that only show us friends that are just like us with their similar thoughts, the fear merchant writers looking to bank new Twitter followers, misinformation websites peddling absolute fiction, and yellow journalism publications choosing which news stories to highlight, it’s only produced an environment where two sides are so sure that they’re the one who is right and nobody is willing to bend and listen to the opposition for a moment. The left has taught itself that lending an ear to ‘the enemy’ (who are almost always believed to be, at their core, sexist or racist) will somehow result in basic human rights being stripped. The right has taught itself to believe that paying attention to the left will bring about a cultural destruction without room for them in it.

What’s perhaps more dangerous is that the laws of decency and respect towards the physicality of people and property, have gone out the window with this sureness. There has been a slow building degeneration of what’s considered acceptable behavior towards those that disagree with you. It started as debate, it escalated to doxxing, and now we have created an environment where violence is condoned, where people make excuses for petty anarchists breaking windows and burning things while smugly sitting behind their keyboards and passing around civil rights quotes to their Facebook friends. The message is clear: “I don’t like you, go away and/or die.”

i like shadows and when rays of sun peak through and fight to be seen.

i like sunsets, and sunrises, and when the moon is so big it blows your mind, or even when it’s a small perfect crescent.

i like the roar of a crowd singing along to their favorite song as their favorite band runs around on stage rocking out to their music.

i like people’s real smiles, the smile they can’t hold back when they’re trying to keep a secret or when they’re about to burst out laughing or when they’re just too happy/excited/content to suppress it.

i like the relationships i have with my family and that they will love and support me no matter what. 

i like flowers and i like trees and i love seeing flowers and trees in places like cities or homes or places they’re not usually seen.

i like buildings with vines growing on them and massive skyscrapers because you can look at them and wonder how long it’s been there or think wow that’s so huge how many people did it take to build that?

i like watching the ocean, from every angle, on the beach with sand between my toes to overlooking it all when driving by from the cliffs. 

i like when my friends say “oh you’d love to hear this!” when they’re about to tell me something awesome. 

i like talking to people, really talking to people, about what their passionate about and sharing what i’m passionate about and getting to know them based on what’s deep inside them. 

i like long drives at night and looking up to see a sky full of stars that i can stare at for hours. 

Work by Silvia Grav

Find more of her pictures here: http://bit.ly/28HNBnN