I can understand why Time chose “The Protester” as its Person of the Year,” but I think the magazine missed the mark (once again). If I were editor of Time, my choice would have been “the homeless American child.”
Think about it. Isn’t it odd to talk about “homeless children” in “the world’s greatest democracy”?
A generation ago it would not have been just odd, it would have been unthinkable.
To me, nothing illustrates the shameful decline in American society so much as the runaway increase in homeless children.
It is chilling to read news stories like the one by Marisol Bello in USA Today. Here is an excerpt:
One in 45 children in the USA – 1.6 million children – were living on the street, in homeless shelters or motels, or doubled up with other families last year, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness.
The numbers represent a 33% increase from 2007, when there were 1.2 million homeless children, according to a report the center is releasing Tuesday.
It used to be that “homeless children” were those little waifs with the big eyes that various charities asked us to support. They lived in faraway places like Africa or Asia, not in America.
When I balked at eating my vegetables, my mother would chide me with: “Think of the starving children in China.” Now, I imagine Chinese mothers are telling their kids to think of the starving children in America.
How can the people responsible for this unacceptable state of affairs sleep at night? How can the members of America’s Congress hold up their heads and look their constituents in the eye? How can the financiers and merchants accept their largesse with a smile? How can the pontificating clergy and navel-gazing pundits keep baying irrelevantly at the moon while these conditions persist?
Shame on you! Shame on all of you!
Shame on the one percent – and shame on the 99 percent.
Shame on the protesters for not doing more. Shame on the non-protesters for sitting this one out.
Shame on Time Magazine for being so blind. Yes, the protesters have made a difference, but they are merely calling attention to the real problem – the rot that has infected America and the rest of the industrialized world.
For a symptom of this sickness, you need only look at the runners-up in the Person of the Year race.
Click here to see the entries.
I could not believe my eyes when I saw Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin among the featured personalities. Paul Ryan?!!!?
If ever there was a poster boy for the soulless monsters who have precipitated the current American collapse, it is Paul Ryan.
As chairman of the House Budget Committee, Ryan is the architect of the worst economic plan ever presented to the American people. Talk about heartless! Talk about oppressive! It would destroy Medicare and other safety net programs and aggravate the very conditions that have led to child homelessness in America. And it would widen the obscene gap between rich and poor.
But the millionaires at Time and among the rest of the modern media, the millionaires in the mega churches, and the millionaires in Congress are out of touch with the real America. They sit in their warm, safe cocoons and make excuses for the looters.
Meanwhile, the society rots rapidly away and more and more children get thrown out on the street.
