Who will
Time choose as Person of the Year next year?
The
homeless?
People who have to choose between food and
their non-Canadian prescription drugs?
"Welfare
reform" victims expected to raise a family making
$7.00/hour at Wal-Mart?
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Time's "Person of the Year" selection is appropriate — if we're talking about which person got screwed over the worst in 2003by Madeline Zane, Unknown News
Dec. 22, 2003
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Can those soldiers' desperate families, living on substandard wages while Halliburton rakes in billions of dollars, cash in a copy of the Time magazine cover for rent money or food stamps?
I know some of your typical progressive anti-war types don't have much sympathy for our fighting men and women — after all, they signed up to be part of the military-industrial complex, so what did they expect? The problem is, more and more often, you're talking about people who didn't have a whole hell of a lot of choices available to them.
The only reason a lot of people are in the service these days is that with the growing gap between rich and poor, the obliteration of the middle class, and the near-total elimination of college financial aid (except loans that have to be paid back), joining the military is just about the only way to pull yourself out of poverty. Those bootstraps that the conservatives think it's so easy to pull yourself up by mostly come in one color these days — fatigue green.
If anyone with the disposable income and extra time to read the grand year-end pronouncements of weekly news magazines was actually serving as an ordinary soldier, I don't think the magazine could get away with such appalling irony. I mean, Christ, who will Time choose as Person of the Year next year? The homeless? People who have to choose between food and their non-Canadian prescription drugs? "Welfare reform" victims expected to raise a family making $7.00/hour at Wal-Mart?
Time's selection of "The American Soldier" only displays the profound disconnect between the flag-waving, knee-jerk "patriotism" that the mainstream media and the Bush administration are so fond of these days, and the hard-knock, exhausting, terrible price for this alleged "patriotism" that is paid every single day by millions of ordinary Americans — both those serving abroad and those here at home. In that sense, maybe Time's choice says a lot about the state of America, circa 2003, after all.
© 2003, by the author.
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