Yeast

Hot off the presses at YouTube, some unexpected beauty from Nicolae Guță.  The song is Eu sunt regele, tu esti coroana (I am the king, you are the crown).

A "seasoned" gentleman in hip hop threads. A beautiful woman dancing with a bichon.  A camera that now wanders, now lingers lovingly over each of them.  And music that imbues the proceedings with sublimity.

Let this serve as a small reminder to those who need it that it's a big world out there, full of fellow humans, many of them doing wonderful things, not all of them within a 50 mile radius of where your ass is currently sitting.  The ones that look like you and that speak with words you understand by an accident of birth are a shrinking minority because the world is happily diversifying, in spite of every effort to the contrary.  While it's fine if you content yourself with your kind -- that's what humans tend to do -- don't confuse your provinciality with Culture.  Culture cannot be preserved and confined and purified.  Think of it not as a restricted shelf in a very controlled library that no one really visits, but more like what you find in a petri dish as large as the cosmos.  It's bound to spread in unpredictable ways, to mutate, to develop properties that are meant to be discovered.

To the purifiers out there: do your worst to "make < insert name of province here > great again" if that's what you can't help doing.  Every recipe has ingredients that by themselves and in large doses taste foul and are toxic, that fight against the goodness of the finished product.  That ultimately is what I think you'll accomplish.  In spite of your objectives, whatever you're able to achieve will get thrown into the agar; you'll produce reactions and react with the culture in ways that will catalyze into unimaginably novel and profound expressions.  Very few of those expressions will be to your liking.  I take some comfort in that.