Week 20 – Day 5 – Give Me Some Justice

by shellgren | Posted on May 21, 2015May 21, 2015

Today I grabbed a couple of pictures of the local police station. Felt a little timely too. I wanted to start grabbing some photos of iconic buildings in downtown Auburn. So today’s choice was the Auburn Justice Center, otherwise know as Massey’s Grocery Store to the old time residents.

Auburn Justice Center today

We live a half mile from the police station, so it doesn’t surprise me that it took more than 20 minutes for the police to respond when I called the other night to report a couple of guys manhandling a drunk woman in the street in front of our house. All three appeared to be quite drunk. The guys finally got the woman in their car and sped off. The woman at the Auburn 911 dispatch told me that it was probably no big deal and they were just having fun. Uhhhhhhhhh….. makes me feel all warm and fuzzy to think that it is no big deal. A police car came by more than 20 minutes later and didn’t even slow down as it came through the neighborhood. Oh well. Don’t get me started on the local drug dealers that serve the local alternative high school and the group home down the block from us.

It really is a pretty cool looking building.

Anyway, the Justice Center still is a pretty cool piece of midcentury architecture.

Love the glass brick and the metal columns.

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The Great Escarpment goes from the northeast of South Africa and swings in a wide semicircle down to the south and then back to the northwest corner of the country. It separates the high central plateau of South Africa from the coastal areas.

Wikipedia has a great image of this.

The Highveld is basically between 5,000 and 6,800 feet in elevation and is part of the central plateau in South Africa. The Lowveld is lower than about 500 meters (1,650 feet). It is basically to the east and northeast of the central plateau. And yes, if you are wondering, there is a middleveld. It is more often referred to as the Bushveld.

The Highveld is basically between 5,000 and 6,800 feet in elevation and is part of the central plateau in South Africa. The Lowveld is lower than about 500 meters (1,650 feet). It is basically to the east and northeast of the central plateau. And yes, if you are wondering, there is a middleveld. It is more often referred to as the Bushveld.

While the highveld is more like a prairie of grasses and the lowveld is grassland with scrubby brush and occasional trees, the bushveld is, amazingly, kind of between them. The bushveld is grassy lands with lots of patches of tall bushes and trees.

At least that is how I would describe them.

Daylin Paul is a fantastic photographer. A collection of his images is called Broken Land. From the October 6, 2019, Sunday Times:
“…the collection begins with aerial photographs of the seemingly legendary natural beauty of the province before Paul’s lens zooms ever closer in for a look at the realities on the ground.
“There pollution is rampant; those who are not lucky enough to find employment in the power industry are forced into dangerous subsistence mining for survival and many residents of towns and informal settlements that abut the power stations are without a proper water or electricity supply and suffer from diseases such as TB.”
Paul is quoted in the article as saying that the connection the indigenous people had to the land is broken. “Now the land is just a place where you put up a house or you dig for something.”
The article continues a bit later with this statement: “When Paul hears US President Donald Trump talking about ‘clean coal’, his experiences in Mpumalanga lead him to react with disdain and outrage because ‘there’s no such thing’.”
The whole article, and its images, was simply stunning. You can read it here, but you must be a subscriber to the paper first.
But better yet, you can see Paul’s own website to see the collection of images called Broken Land here: https://www.daylinpaul.com/broken-land

I had heard from people about the issues with the power industry in South Africa, but didn’t know how severe it was. As one person related to me, “the president has taken a lot of money from the coal power industry. The bribes were there to keep the industry free from too many regulations.” Or as one watchdog group there says, “Public procurement is particularly prone to corruption, and bribery thrives at the central government level.”

I am talking about South Africa, of course. I know nothing like that happens in the States.

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