Building my website has been an exercise in many disciplines.

Apart from viewing my professional history through my photographs, more and more I realize them for what they are: a record, a document and a mirror of our society.

One of the questions I have been asking myself recently is, how much have we grown as a nation? How forward thinking, have we become as a country?

We call ourselves the greatest democracy in the world, yet we are willing to destroy our natural resources,  sell our democracy to lobbyists whose only consideration is their own profit, and undermine our constitution, all in the name of progress?

Progress for whom?

This progress guarantees no future for our children and in the name of this progress we  give permission to take their lives prematurely in an epidemic called gun violence.

Not only is Congress giving permission and guaranteeing a shorter life span for children they are starving our children and working families while feeding the insatiable belly of corporations. Corporate greed and religious intolerance galvanizes and energizes the chasm dividing our nation, through a violence that especially targets the most vulnerable populations, children. As George Zimmerman said: “I was doing God’s plan.” His  justification rooted in a moral ethic that is supported by lobby espoused religious zeal, dressed up as law, entitling him to take the  life of Trayvon Benjamin Martin.

Have we really become a nation that settles for watching “reality TV” while dismissing, denying and refusing to participate in our own democracy?

Why are these same themes repeating themselves?

The life of an African-American males continues to be devalued and discounted, around the country and especially  in the very same regions that would take our right to vote.

Women are still fighting, clamoring for our right to own our bodies, to choose, to access healthcare.

The sentinels screaming the religious indignation of  ‘Right to Life‘ are the very same guardians obstructing health care outside the womb. The very same group body opposing the collective body of citizens in the right to vote, in equality for all people, of all colors and races, in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and in our inalienable right in freedom of speech.

In love thy neighbor as thyself, where is the love to feed those who do not have enough to eat because the appetite of corporate greed exceeded their neighbors?

These guardians, the very same sentinels whose right to bear arms will stand their ground in ‘Right to Life.’ Right to whose life?

We are in peril of losing one of our most precious pillars of democracy, and that is our right to vote. It is our collective voice. Our mandate. The navigation that guarantees our waters of democracy.

Our guarantee of an even keel for all, not just the few.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I have written a few toward this sum today.

These photographs, my copyright, were recorded while on assignment for the Los Angeles Times and will be available via my archive