Pulitzer Prize winning photo you might have missed

The Coffee Shop
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I visited the Newseum in DC for the first time yesterday. For anyone living in the area or for those who plan to visit, I highly recommend it. Among the gallery of Pulitzer Prize photos going back several decades, there is 9/11 exhibit with a piece of the antenna tower that was on top of one of the WTC buildings. There is also a piece of the Berlin Wall, the mangled truck axel from the Ryder truck from the Oklahoma City bombing and many other very interesting exhibits.

This picture was posted in the gallery and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. It really got to me. It was taken by a freelance photographer, Kevin Carter who was covering the famine in Sudan. At this time near one feeding station in Sudan there were about 20 people dying of starvation every hour.

The story behind the photo is that he heard some crying in a field and came across this very young girl who was trying to get to the feeding station which was about a quarter mile away. Behind the girl is this vulture. He snapped the photo and then scared the bird away, but he didn’t help the girl because they were told not to touch them due to disease they may carry. Right after he shot this photo, he went away and became very upset about not being able to help the girl. The story concludes that he regretted not helping her and he killed himself a few months later.
I know this is a downer, but maybe can serve as a reminder that now matter how much we bitch and complain about stupid crap, that we really don’t have it bad after all.

http://www.pulitzer.org/files/highlights/1994.jpg

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Tragic - but alas, that is life.

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it’s this placid contentedness with the status quo that makes right wingers so . . . right wingers

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No, that is just life. We are blessed to live in the United States, and the others here to be in “first world” countries where we are able to sustain life and even get on the internet. Some groups of people DONT WANT our eastern lifestyles and tribes in Africa as well as South America and Indonesia are doing just fine with out our help - even if their life styles seem archane to us in our fancy homes riding fancy bikes.

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Christ that makes me want to puke.

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**Christ that makes me want to puke. **

I broke down and cried right there in the middle of the gallery when I saw it for the first time yesterday.
This happens every single day to thousands of people around the world. On one hand one can say this is just the “nature of things, survival of the fittest etc.”
The other side wonders how human beings let other other human beings starve to death.

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Yup and you never really understood what he was trying to say. And…to his credit there are others as well, including one who was there, who suggest that this photo was staged. He (former LR denizen) wasn’t the great evildoer he was made out to be but then that is a discussion for another day…