Once upon the time, before the two towers went down in smoke, and the alphabet soup of armed, uniformed men started proliferating in the land of the free; when the world knew California as a place of film industry and good surf, not as a place of the largest energy crisis, huge debt and the longshoremen’s strike - I sneaked into the Navy Seals training grounds in San Diego, and took a couple of pictures.

Navy Seals training grounds

Somebody, eventually, shouted at me from the watchtower, informing me that I was in the restricted area, and ordering me to leave immediately. I left. Nobody came after me. Today, probably, I’d be surrounded by armed security forces, arrested, interrogated, my camera seized and the film erased. And these innocent pictures of an old, burned, destroyed helicopter, used exclusively for training purposes, would not be available to you.

inside the helicopter

And if I didn’t do it, how would I see this graffiti inside the helicopter? Did I harm anybody by doing it? No. Did anybody harm me for doing it? No. That was the America we knew and liked.

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