Photo Of The Year

Ben Goff / The Gazette

Take a good, long look at it. This photograph was taken in the "richest" country in the world, the country of your dreams, my dreams, where a man's willingness to work has long been prized, respected, and rewarded above all else. So why is this man in jail?

Why didn't James Richard Verone just pull himself up by the bootstraps? Why didn't he just stop feeling sorry for himself and his thoroughly debilitating list of physical conditions? Why did he actually expect to receive medical care after fifty nine years of being a productive citizen in the land of his birth? Surely, real men like a Limbaugh, Beck or Cheney would be able to work right through the pain, without complaint, without these pitiful theatrics for public attention!

This is what we have allowed ourselves to become- a country that kicks its own to the very gutter the second they can no longer produce to maximum peak efficiency- and profit. For anyone counting every lost penny (or dream), living one check to the next- this could very well be you, it could damn well most definitely be me. We live in a country where greed is a virtue, and being poor is a disease unto itself, if you're part of the ever growing "working poor," you're obviously not working hard enough. If you're as sick as this man and can't work, you're lazy- if you can't find work, you're criminal.

Somehow the American Dream got distorted, twisted beyond all manner of reason. Instead of striving to get their fair share, there were those that started demanding it all and goddamn anything and anyone who got in their goddamn way. Middle class jobs were outsourced out of existence, war became our number one industry, mercenaries became honorable, education the luxury of those who could afford it. All this while the rich were allowed encouraged to scheme, divert and reconfigure other peoples' money into personal pinnacles of wealth so obscene that the very government (who they refused to pay tax to) forgave and then aided them anew when they failed in their grandest of larcenies. And who do you think they blamed?

So look long and hard at that photo good people of these semi United States. And think of it some more when your "leaders" ask you to rally round the flag, fight another war, and give up something else for the filthiest of those you already helped make rich. It's the same look the emperor wore that day the empire cascaded all around him- the same look its citizenry denied in their own faces for many a year prior.