This shot is from the FBI website. It is a still from a surveillance camera. There are surveillance camera everywhere and there were tens of thousands of images to go through.

Over at reddit, there are – I have no idea, somewhere between ten and a million – people collectively thinking and talking about the images.  That is somewhere between ten and a million very smart, very computer savvy, very energized, people.

We live in a world with an astounding amount of available information. Processing is the problem but, when the government wants to throw all its resources into the game they bring a seemingly almost unlimited amount of processing. A guy from Florida sees the still above and sends the Feds this shot.

Apparently suspect No. 2 was even wearing his signature hat so he would be easier to recognize. Now his picture, in his signature hat, was all over  the internets. At that point the two brothers must have known, all the way to the bone, that they were fucked.

To me, here, 2700 miles away, watching television and this screen, off and on, during the last thirty or so hours, it seems hard to believe that they would not catch these guys. It was a surprise – and to my way of thinking, a happy surprise – that they caught one alive, but our world is too interconnected to not have caught them. There are too many pictures out there. There are too many people looking at the pictures.

In the end, one poor, wounded, scared 19 year old boy, was alone, hiding in a boat in a stranger’s backyard; nobody, not the Left, not the Right, not even his uncle, was on his side.

As the police, the SWAT Teams, the FBI, the Marshals, et al, unwound and left  Watertown, they got a standing ovation.

 Erosion, volcanic eruption, earthquakes, floods, tectonic grinding, landslides, and other natural forces act continuously on the earth’s crustal rock, creating various types of debris: gravel deposits, mudflats in the tidal estuaries of creeks, cobble terraces, and beaches of black lava sand. When chemical agents such as phosphorus and nitrogen infuse this debris, and biological entities including microbes and earthworms work material into it organic enough to support plants, it becomes soil. A soil that is chemically or organically exhausted, that has been pulverized or become deeply parched, that has been invaded by decomposing rock, or that has been fouled by sewage or industrial pollution to the point where it can not support plant life is called dirt. Barry Lopez in Home Ground /Language for an American Landscape, a very nice book of very short essays pretending to be definitions. Thanks JR !

Yesterday, there was a picture gallery of new US Citizens in The Guardian. They had just been sworn in as naturalized citizens and it reminded me of the only Immigration Ceremony that I have seen. It was in November of 2006. Michele and I had gone to see Marianne Nannestad become an United States Citizen. A United States Citizen having all the rights that I was born with and often don’t appreciate.

The Ceremony started out much differently than I expected. It was  instructive, informative and legalistic with lots of detailed instruction rather than celebratory;  it bordered on being jingoistic.

I have read that an organization is dead when it worries more about keeping people out more than it worries about trying to get more people in. While there are people in our country who feel that way, they are in a – shrinking, I hope – minority.

Towards the ceremony’s climax, the presenter, read a list of countries – in alphabetical order from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe including Great Britain from which there seemed to be a surprising (to me) number of   people – that the immigrants were from. As the country was named the immigrants from that country stood and remained standing until the whole class -group? – was standing. Then the soon to be Citizens repeated the Oath of Citizenship that has remained unchanged since George Washington wrote it.

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

In the end, it was very very moving. I left thrilled that I live in this great country that doesn’t just tolerate immigrants but still wants them.