We can no longer hide from who we are. Not anymore. Not when things like this happen. I see something historic in this, don’t you?

We live in a cruel, cruel society. A land where the game is rigged for straight up misery for the common man and the winners have been taking all that they can get away with for decades. I was deflated when I read about this story. I just wanted to put my head down on my desk and cry.

From ABC News:

A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report.

He then sat down and waited for police to arrive. “… I say, ‘I’ll be sitting right over here, on the chair, waiting for the police,’” Verone told reporters, recalling the June 9 robbery in an interview from Gaston County Jail.

And wait for the police, he did.

“He’s sitting on the sofa as you walk in the front door,” the bank teller said in a 911 call.

Police arrested Verone where he sat. He was unarmed.

Verone said he asked for $1 to show that his motives were medical, not monetary, according to news reports. With a growth in his chest, two ruptured disks and no job, Verone hoped a three-year stint in prison would afford him the health care he needed.

“I’m sort of a logical person and that was my logic, what I came up with,” Verone told reporters. “If it is called manipulation, then out of necessity because I need medical care, then I guess I am manipulating the courts to get medical care.”

But the charge of larceny, not armed robbery, is unlikely to keep Verone behind bars for more than 12 months. He is being held in Gaston County Jail on a $2,000 bond, according to a spokesman for the jail, and is scheduled to appear in court June 28.

Read a more detailed story of what led an American citizen to chose prison over his “freedom” at the Gaston Gazette. It’s enough to make you want to puke.

What he did took guts. I see this as a principled stand. I sincerely hope this gentleman gets the medical treatment he needs and that one day statues are erected of him across this land…

And now, if you really want to weep yourself senseless, watch this clip of FDR discussing a Second Bill of Rights in 1944. This footage, long thought lost, was found by Michael Moore’s researchers and used so brilliantly in Capitalism: A Love Story (a film I urge you all to see if you haven’t. On Netflix VOD). Imagine if the country had realized these goals 70 years ago?