OK, I'll admit it. I subscribed to a glossy magazine filled with local LA food, fashion and "fun." It was actually a $5 deal on Amazon and, being relatively new to Los Angeles, I thought it might be fun to see what's around and help me a bit in navigating my Californian town. (Though, if you know me, you know that the navigational device has yet to be invented that can prevent me from getting lost. We do have a GPS -- I find it works best to turn off the sound and just aim the car toward the little house icon -- at least it gets me home!)
Anyway, I was flipping through the November issue last night and ran across a fashion spread entitled "House Calls" showing photos of women who I read were "appropriately dressed for receiving guests at any time of day." I really thought I was appropriately dressed for guests the majority of the time, but I'm probably wrong since my idea of "fashion" is dollar day at Goodwill, but I digress. The women in the magazine were shown casually lounging around in thousand dollar leggings (that seriously don't look that much better than my $5 ones -- at least not if you're squinting and it's a fairly dark room), and $10,000 watches and bracelets as their male model gardeners, and water delivery men, and plumbers attended to their various needs (not going there, either.)
The reason I'm even mentioning this is because it occurred to me that the incredibly-coiffed, artfully made-up, appropriately accessorized, and surgically-enhanced coffee-drinking woman relaxing in the long grasses of her exotic backyard garden while gazing lovingly at the handsome young man delivering her bottled water, is wearing a $6,000 dress that could buy both Salee and her father's round-trip plane tickets. Salee is a young Iraqi girl who lost her legs to a United States air strike in 2006, was brought to the States through No More Victims in 2007 for new legs, and has now grown out of those legs and needs to come back. Salee, by the way, lost not only her legs to that air strike, but her best friend and brother as well.
They were outside playing hopscotch at the time.
It seems to me that something is wrong with this picture. OK, well there was more than one thing wrong with that particular picture, but what I'm referring to is the fact that the same amount of money needed to fly a little girl here for new prostheses -- a child whose real legs were blown off by our bombs and who could care less about ever wearing a $6,000 dress -- is covering this model with three or four yards of silk and wool.
In the current economy, it'll take months to raise the money to bring Salee back for new legs so she can walk again.
And, to quote Forrest Gump, "That's all I have to say about that." Just something to think about.