A friend told this story recently:

• I went for a walk with my camera yesterday. Didn't get any good pictures, but a man I met gave me a nice quote. "I see you again, I’m going to smash your f*** camera. This ain’t no scenic area. This is the ghetto. Don’t you come here taking no picture of my house."

The way I read the story is this: there are a good number of Americans who know that their views, their stories, are either ignored are written up by somebody else, not by them. And among them this fellow was tired of it and angry, and he didn't want to be anybody's "quaint picture of poverty" either. That's part of what I think he was saying. [My friend said he wasn't photographing the buy's house, which is cool.]

If you visit here from time to time you see that one of the things I'm interested in is who gets to speak and who is silent in our society, and why, and what people can do about it. This guys knows something about the country that many people don't know--wouldn't you agree?