The Way Things Are. Say it ain’t so pa…

Vanity Fair recently ran a piece on the 25 best photographs and in it, there was this one of a starving child that left me breathless. I am not at loss because of a naivete that makes me think everything can be perfect and that equal distribution is something we can all just get along over. I am at a loss because amidst the same mudd of the web where this photo was sitting, are articles just adjacent to it about how some guy in Philly just bought his kids $500,000 seats for Jets games and Lindsay Lohan pissing away money in $20,000 a day spas masquerading as rehabs.

Really? Are we really ok with this? Are we complacent enough to not have an issue with a world where a guy buys his kids 2 physical places to sit and watch a sports game that at an opportunity cost level would have saved that starving child and 1,000 more like him.

Somewhere, the mirror cells of my brain, the mechanisms that allow me to look at something and mirror the pain being felt by another are firing away as I watch this moment frozen in time, as though someone has slowed down the process of an infant starving to death on the ground. Photos like this are supreme and truth finds us in a metaphor where we with our gluttony are the gazing vulture sitting in the background.

Yet, this must be the way things are, for in the same way that we can close the browser and revive our interaction with a more comfortable reality of $60,000 cars and MTV worlds away, would we also be able to walk away from this child had it been laying there before us.

Update (10/28 3:27pm PST):
Case in point, this article just hit yahoo. Are you $^@^!’ng kidding me!
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/yoon/1653