In this talk Watts reminds me of what I heard the Shoshone healer, Rolling Thunder, say in the 1980s: “There is no honor in being a victim”.

As Goodall tells BBC Future, this was long before the era of digital photography, so she had to wait a while before she could see the printed images. “It was couple of months or more before there was a safe way to send exposed rolls to the [National] Geographic for processing, and then another wait while they sent the prints back to Kigoma,” she recalls. “When I saw it, though I did not realise it would become iconic, it did make me think of Michelangelo’s painting of God reaching out to Man.”

In June of 2021, U.S. President Joseph Biden signed into law the federal holiday of “Juneteenth” (yep, they actually made up a word). Juneteenth, auspiciously, is to commemorate “the end of slavery”. However, slavery is still legal, quite so, in the United States which is why Juneteenth is a joke. It is a joke, because it is a lie. A blatant lie; and an insult to boot.

(continued)