{"id":7561,"date":"2019-12-28T18:53:28","date_gmt":"2019-12-28T18:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nevilleronan.com\/blog\/?p=7561"},"modified":"2019-12-28T18:53:28","modified_gmt":"2019-12-28T18:53:28","slug":"by-any-other-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nevilleronan.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/28\/by-any-other-name\/","title":{"rendered":"By any other name"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I woke up to a rainy morning here in Florida … soft rain, the kind that seems as much mist as rain. So the thought occurred to me that this might be the perfect morning to head to a patch of roses that I know not far from me, with camera in hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it was a good choice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to play in tight to the flowers and focus on the presence of rain drops on their petals. I have taken shots like this a number of times and in truth, I can never get enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roses by themselves are beautiful anyway, but adding a touch of mist takes them up a notch in my opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I wandered from flower to flower, I breathed in such a beautiful aroma and it made me regret that cameras cannot (yet) capture the scent. Sometimes the pictures themselves can only tell half the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a flower-shop level smell and until cameras do manage to capture scent, you will just have to take my word that this smell alone made my trip worthwhile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hope you enjoy the selection of shots at the end of the post. I was pretty happy with the end result and secure in the knowledge that it was a morning well spent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I sat back in the car, I mused with the thought that I really am poor at knowing flowers names. I love them, don’t get me wrong. I am just unable to commit to memory what they are called. Hence the safety of knowledge this morning that I was really dealing with roses. I mean, everyone knows a rose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I recalled that line out of Romeo and Juliette where Shakespeare pronounced that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And of course, he was right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My thoughts then drifted along how obsessed we become with naming things and how we often use naming as a mechanism to enhance or detract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, we only go to war against “militants, militias, and regimes”, while we have “defense forces” acting on behalf of a “democratic government”. When a people try to liberate their country from oppression or invasion, we refer to them as “terrorists”. Unless of course, we agree with them, in which case they become “freedom fighters”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Name calling has become a tool of choice these days for the twitter idiot who tries to fire up his base with pathetic “sleepy, crooked, or nasty” tags for those who actually have a moral high ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember in school years when name calling was seen as something that only bullies did … oh wait, scratch that thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We use naming as a mechanism to continually sort and place in boxes, people, groups, and things that we agree or don’t agree with. And sometimes we obsess with names that people even call us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But does it really matter what we call anything? I understand that we have to be able to teach our young how to identify and that type of naming is fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But when we use naming in order to characterize, we step too far towards an extreme. We refer to sharks as “predators”, yet we savage them in unbelievable numbers so some idiots can have a bowl of shark fin soup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We use the name “Killer Whale” because it fills the seats at water worlds while we brutalize and abuse these Orcas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We use the name “prostitute, slut, or whore”, to degrade women that invariably have higher morals than the men that tag them as such. But it crates an artificial high ground from which we can look down on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We use the word “mob” to describe a large group of people whose motivation we disagree with. But a “gathering or crowd” if it happens to be something we agree with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I often try to pull my thoughts on these subjects down to a natural world level. I ask myself what takes place in the natural world that is comparable. As far as I can tell, animals don’t discriminate against other animals based on a name or description. They only ask “can I eat it or will it eat me?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The closest I could come to in this regards was from Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock. Where the Fraggles name for us humans was “Silly Creatures”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did they get it right or what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n