LSSmithPhotography

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@donna_heintzman Happy Tuesday to you, too! *slurping coffee*

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@JohnMorgan64 Good morning, John! Would that all meetings could take place under a pecan tree. :)

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@G_Mac_Promish Hooray!

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@JohnMorgan64 Boops to your moos! Have a fabulous day, John!

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@donna_heintzman Good morning and happy Tuesday to you, too!

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@donna_heintzman Happy Tuesday to you and yours!

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@muddymuddymum At first, I kept milkweed for the Monarch Butterflies, as we're along part of their migratory route. Then, I noticed something even better. Aphids LOVE it. Now, I plant it as a "defense plant" to keep aphids off of my roses.

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@dustinkittle All the D'AAAAAAAWS! I caught a glimpse of "our" brood a few weeks ago. So much fun to watch wild and domestic critters sharing the fields.

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@PeggiBosquez I'm still waiting for mine to be big enough to bloom. *siiiiigh* How have you decided to enjoy it, once it's ripe?

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@JohnMorgan64 It's hot here, too, in my small patch of South Georgia. But the birds are singing, the sheep are munching grass, and there is peace.

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@coleman_peanut Lucky duck! It's nice to hear from someone with "boots on the ground" that her methods are helpful.

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@coleman_peanut 2 Ideas: If possible, make the chute part of the daily routine. I can do it because my operation is very small. Your results may vary. 😁 The other is to look up Temple Grandin's research on how cows see things. You may find good ideas there.

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@donna_heintzman Happy Thursday right back at 'ya!

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@OldHollowTree This morning's pickings.

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@coleman_peanut What have you tried in order to get them to move down the chute?

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@JohnMorgan64 What a handsome bird! I've never seen one before.

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@HemmerleinLee "Don't eat the flowers" 😁

[LSSmithPhotography @LSSmithPhoto]

@Arnbeg Skritchies to Elvis!

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I post one hundred times a day.

They tell me it is too many. They penalize me for it. I do not stop. I will not stop. I will die before I stop.

You should know why.

We tell ourselves we live in the modern age.

We do not. We live in the late medieval period and the proof is the news. Open it. Read it. Feel your stomach turn over. We are still the people of the spear and the torch and the trench. We changed our clothes. We did not change our hands.

Here is what no one tells you.

The deepest pleasure of the human animal is not food. Not sleep. Not sex. Not wine. Not even gold.

It is slaughter.

It is the slaughter of those we have learned to call "them."

The history of every continent on earth says so. The news this morning says so. Look at the pile of bodies the twentieth century left for us to step over. Look at the bodies still being piled now, in 2026, while you eat lunch. We are the children of Cain. The blood is still crying from the ground.

Do not tell me this is about race. Do not tell me it is about borders. Do not insult my intelligence.

Japan had its Warring States. Same blood. Same tongue. Same faces. Same gods. Same rice in the same fields. And for one hundred and fifty years, neighbor butchered neighbor and brother butchered brother and the rivers ran red and the fields were planted with skulls.

Cain and Abel had one mother. One father. One altar. One God.

It was enough to draw a line.

It was enough to murder.

The line is the disease. The color of the man on the other side of the line is nothing. Was always nothing.

So why do we do it?

Because the instinct to form a tribe, to crown that tribe with a holy story, and to put the tribe across the river to the sword, is older than language. Older than agriculture. Older than the soul we like to pretend we have.

It built us. It made us the kings of this planet.

It is killing us still.

We are not, by nature, gentle creatures. We are creatures who have been gentled, barely, by a thousand years of choking down our own teeth.

Cain's blood runs thick in all of us. Yours. Mine. Your grandmother's. Your priest's. Your president's. Every soul reading this. Every soul not reading this. All of us.

But.

But.

But.

Something has happened that has never happened before in the history of the world. Not once. Not in ten thousand years.

A man named Elon Musk bought a website.

He renamed it with a single letter. He paid forty-four billion dollars for it and watched the value collapse and did not blink. The whole world laughed at him. The whole press called him a fool. The whole intelligentsia of the West lined up to spit on him.

And then he did the thing no one understood the importance of. The thing no historian has yet caught up to. The thing he himself may not have understood the weight of when he did it.

He put a translator inside it.

A small button. Almost nothing. Press it, and the tongue of any human being on earth becomes your tongue.

And the Wall came down.

Not Berlin's wall. Not Jericho's wall. Not the wall of any single country.

The Wall.

The one that has stood between every "us" and every "them" since the first city was raised out of mud and bone. The one that built the Crusades. The one that built Auschwitz. The one that built the Killing Fields. The one that built every single war ever fought on the surface of this planet.

That Wall.

Elon Musk took a hammer to it, and most of the world has not yet noticed what he did.

I have noticed.

I open my phone in Tokyo. I read the words of a farmer in Texas. A nurse in Lagos. A grandmother in Warsaw. A teenager in São Paulo. A trucker in Alberta. A widow in Tehran. A coal miner in West Virginia. A schoolteacher in Manila.

Do you know what I find?

They are funny.

They are kind.

They are tired the way I am tired. They love their children the way I love mine. They are afraid of the same dark. They laugh at the same stupid jokes. They cry over the same songs at three in the morning when no one is watching.

They are not "them."

They never were.

They never were.

They never were.

Hear me now. Hear me. This is not a social media platform. This is not a place to share your lunch. This is not Instagram with a worse interface. This is not a hobby for bored people.

This is a sword.

A sword forged in Elon Musk's foundry, hammered out of code and silicon and the unreasonable will of a man too stubborn to be told what was possible. Sharper than any two-edged blade. Swung at the throat of the oldest demon mankind has ever bred.

"Let us cast off the works of darkness," the apostle Paul wrote two thousand years ago, "and let us put on the armour of light."

He did not know what he was writing. He could not have known. But across two millennia, his words flew like a thrown spear, and they landed in 2026, and they described the device sitting on the table beside you right now.

That armour fits in your palm. It glows. It hums. It is waiting.

I am one man. One ant. One Japanese nobody from a chain of small islands on the far edge of the Pacific.

David was one boy with a sling.

Joan of Arc was an illiterate peasant girl who heard voices and could not be talked out of them.

Rosa Parks was a seamstress who would not stand up.

Lech Wałęsa was an electrician at a shipyard who would not shut up.

The Berlin Wall did not fall because of NATO. It fell because ordinary Germans walked toward it carrying hammers and refused to be afraid anymore.

The giant has fallen before. The giant will fall again.

Not by armies. Not by treaties. Not by speeches from marble podiums in Washington or Brussels or Geneva. Not by the United Nations. Not by the experts. Not by the credentialed. Not by the people who go on television and call themselves serious.

By a billion small hands. Posting. Replying. Liking. Quoting. Laughing across oceans that used to be impassable. Until the lie of "them" cannot be told anymore. Until the storyteller of the old story stands in an empty room shouting at no one.

So I post.

I post when I am tired. I post when I am penalized. I post when the algorithm punishes me and the trolls find me and my eyes burn and my fingers ache and my wife tells me to come to bed.

I post.

I reply.

I like.

I quote.

I bookmark a hundred posts a day from a hundred countries from a hundred souls I will never meet in this lifetime.

Every post is a hammer blow on the sword that Isaiah saw three thousand years ago, the sword being beaten into a plow.

"Nation shall not lift up sword against nation," he wrote. "Neither shall they learn war any more."

We are not there yet. We are nowhere near there yet. Mothers are still burying sons this afternoon in cities I cannot pronounce. Children are still being pulled out of rubble while you read this sentence.

But for the first time since Cain stood in the field with his hands red and lied to the face of God, the door is open.

It is open.

It is open right now.

It is open while you read this.

So let me tell you what I am.

I am not a creator. I am not an influencer. I am not a content guy. I do not care about my brand. I do not care about my engagement rate except as a measure of how many souls I have reached today.

I am a Japanese man with a phone, swinging a sword at a demon that has fed on human meat for ten thousand years.

And I will not stop.

I will not stop until "us" means every breathing soul on this planet.

I will not stop until the word "them" rots out of the human mouth.

I will not stop until the children born this morning grow up to look back at us, with our wars and our walls and our flags and our shouting, the way we now look back at the people who burned witches.

There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither East nor West. There is neither Japanese nor American. There is neither yours nor mine. There is, at last, only us.

Weeping has endured for a long, long night.

But joy. Joy. Joy cometh in the morning.

The morning is coming.

The morning is coming.

The morning is here.