Some may see this piece and think it to be just an image of a boy holding some money. However, this piece has many layers to it, like an onion. Onions have layers; this piece has layers. And on maybe seven or so of those layers, one may find a powerful piece of political commentary. 

Let’s not see the subject as a boy holding some money.

Let’s see him for what he’s symbolizing.

He is representative of the scales. The scales of justice. 

Note how he lacks a blindfold, going against the age-old saying “justice is blind”. This symbolizes inequality in the world from a variety of categories of prejudices. And, as an added hit, look at his hands—the scales being filled with money represent corruption for the sake of greedy motives. No wonder his expression is of irritation and dissatisfaction. He doesn’t want to be part of a corrupt system, but the world’s situation has forced him into his position. 

"Are you SURE you're ready for your hike?" Pixel's mom was asking, as he sped toward the door.

He skidded to a stop.

"Absolutely!" he said, flashing her a double thumbs up, but paused as he mentally ran through all of the devices he had put in his backpack.

"I've got my laptop, portable charger, Tree Analyzer 6000, BARK Texturizer 9000, and a good old GPS device!" he rattled off, bouncing excitedly.

His mom couldn't suppress a smile as she held up a brown paper bag.  "And your lunch?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah," Pixel said sheepishly, as he unceremoniously shed his backpack and stuffed the bag inside.

"Okay, NOW I'm ready!"  he said, putting the backpack back on. "I'm going to get some AMAZING data for my synthetic wood project!!"

"Hang on, I thought you were going to take a hike with your friends?" she said, wiping her hands on her berry-stained apron.

Pixel harrumphed, feeling impatient. "It's called MULTITASKING, Mom.  We're going to do the dead reckoning challenge, AND I'm going to get my data, AND we're gonna have fun too! And I gotta go now bye!"

With that, he raced out the door, backpack bouncing against his back as he ran to the meetup spot.

When he arrived at the designated bench next to City Hall, Stephanie and Trixie were already there, dressed in their scout uniforms, and examining the map.

"God, Pixel, did you have to take the kitchen SINK with you too??" Trixie asked, eyeing his enormous backpack with distaste.

"I haven't been able to make a portable kitchen sink yet," he said sadly.  "Trust me, I've tried."

Trixie opened her mouth, but then closed it again. "O-kay."

Stephanie cleared her throat at the two of them.  "Settle down, guys. We have a mountain spring to find today! So tell me, are you guys ready for the...Adventure Scouts Dead Reckoning Challenge??"

"Yeah!" The other two responded brightly.

“Are you ready to FIND that mountain spring?!”

"Yeah!"

"Well then, the FIRST leg of our journey," she looked back down at the map, "We have to walk due west, from this EXACT spot, for...a hundred and sixty five paces!" she announced, then looked up at Pixel. "Do you have your Step Counter 2000?"

"You bet I do!" he said, pulling the little device out of his pocket and setting it to 160 before affixing it to his hip.

Trixie carefully turned her compass dial due west, in the direction of the fields and the further-away mountains. "That's the way, Pinkie!"

"Adventure Scouts! Forward, MARCH!" Stephanie crowed, and the three of them strode into the fields, intent on finding the mountain spring as soon as possible.

 Stephanie handled the map, Trixie handled the compass, and Pixel handled the pace-counting as they  walked on through the field.  Their journey had five legs, each having a slightly different compass direction and length. Pixel personally would have preferred to use his GPS, but...Stephanie and Trixie wanted to try the simple wilderness method, and he was still happy to spend time with them.  

He DID bring his GPS along, though.  Just in case of emergency.

-

As they neared the end of the fourth leg, they were all sweating and panting .  Their Adventure Scout hats, come to find out, were woefully inadequate against the blistering summer sun.

"Now we are at the last, and LONGEST, leg of our journey," Stephanie said, taking a swig of her water, prompting Trixie and Pixel to do the same. "We have to turn...due west AGAIN for...seven hundred paces!"

Trixie looked out at the open field, and sighed. "That's a LONG way," she observed, shoulders slumping.

"But look, we're going to head into some trees!" Pixel said excitedly, "We can SING to pass the time!"

He started marching ahead, singing Gizmo Guy at the top of his lungs.

"Pixel, wait up!"

"Who said YOU got to pick the song?!"

-

For the next hundred paces, they squabbled about which song they should all sing, deciding to sing No One's Lazy in Lazytown three times in a row solely because they couldn't agree on anything else.  That is, until Trixie had the great idea of singing an EDITED version of Mr. Golden Sun (“Mr. Sun! Sun! Mr. Golden Sun, would you PLEASE DON'T SHINE ON MEEE!”).  Now instead of arguing, they were laughing, and collaborating, and complaining about the blistering heat through song.

These little children are sick of you/I hope clouds come out and COVER you!

-

"Oh, thank GOODNESS," Trixie sighed as they approached the first of the trees. "We're going to have some COVER now."

"This is an apple grove!" Pixel said excitedly, slinging off his backpack momentarily with a thunk to grab his Tree Analyzer 6000. "Did you know that fruit-bearing apple trees can grow up to 20 feet tall?"

"That's 20 feet?" Trixie said, squinting up at one of them. "I thought it was at least a HUNDRED!"

"Of COURSE it's not a hundred," Stephanie chided, "A hundred would be like...on top of the clouds!"

"Actually, a hundred feet would be more like a ten-story building," Pixel said, absentmindedly, as he scanned one of the tree trunks. "Did you know that different types of apple tree branches can be spliced together onto the same trunk? The process is called-"

"Come on, Pixel, you're making me lose my concentration!"  Trixie complained, head bowed over the compass. "Can't you just...quietly enjoy nature?"

"I enjoy nature more when I know facts and figures about what I'm looking at!" He retorted.

"Fine, just...all your 'facts and figures' are giving me a headache."

Pixel blushed, and lowered his head. "Sorry."

"Trixie, don't be mean," Stephanie chided, a bit belatedly.

They walked further in awkward silence, through the large and equally quiet apple grove. According to the map, the grove would dump out at a rocky outcrop, with the spring pouring down directly in front of them.

But Pixel didn't even see any water at all. He didn't think too hard about it, gathering data and bark pieces for his other project, until his Step Counter 2000 beeped at his hip.

“Guys, we have gone 700 steps!” he announced.

“What? We CANT have!" Stephanie exclaimed, looking from the map to their surroundings. "We are still in the middle of this apple forest!”

Trixie stopped dead in her tracks and looked from the compass in her hand to the apple tree canopy, back and forth.

"Uh, Pinkie?"

"Yes?"

"I don't...think we're going true west right now," she said slowly.

Stephanie blinked. "What?"

"Well," she gestured, "That's what the COMPASS says.  But look!" she gestured again, at the afternoon sun filtering through the trees.  "We should be heading toward the sun, and the sun is over THERE!"

"Uh oh," Pixel and Stephanie said simultaneously.

"If we screwed up any of the legs of our journey," she said, eyes widening in terror, "Then we could be ANYWHERE right now!"

"Don't worry guys," Pixel said, shrugging his backpack off onto the ground and opening it up, "I brought a GPS in case of emergency."

He hummed in contentment, unable to stop himself from being a little bit smug.  He was so PREPARED!

"It's probably at the bottom, though, let me just-oh NO!" Pixel said as he pulled his laptop out of his bag.

It was dripping with red liquid.

"Is your laptop BLEEDING?!" Stephanie gasped.

"That's DISGUSTING!" Trixie recoiled.

"No no no no no," Pixel said, pulling the laptop open with a fast-beating heart, and pressed the power key.

It did not light up.  

It did not whir.

"Oh no, my FILES!" he lamented. "I was going to back it all up TOMORROW!"

"Pixel, you seem, um, unconcerned, about the um, the blood coating your laptop," Stephanie said apprehensively, taking a step back.

"It's not BLOOD, Stephanie," replied Pixel with a deep sigh, "IT's my JUICE."

"Your what?"

"My mom..." he sighed again, "my mom made me some home made...homemade currant juice, for my lunch, because she always says it's good for long hikes. I don't know why she says that. It's just JUICE," he shrugged, carefully placing the broken laptop down on a patch of dry grass. "OH, This is TERRIBLE. I had that laptop exactly to my specifications! It took me AGES to save up for it! I..." he swallowed hard, willing himself not to cry over something so stupid. "Liquid damage is basically a death sentence for it."

"That sucks, Pixel, but what about your GPS?" Trixie asked.

"Huh?"

"Your GPS? You went into your backpack to get it, remember?" she prompted.

Pixel gasped in horror and turned back to his backpack, a horrible feeling settling in his stomach.

He pulled every single thing in his backpack out, one by one, in a rising panic as he saw that all of them were soaked in the same dark juice--including the little GPS device that he had been counting on to save them.

"No, no, no no NO!" he said, pressing his fingers to the stained power button over and over.

Nothing.

Pixel sat on the ground, brain turning numb.  He had no devices.  If he had no devices, then all of his data was lost. If all of his data was lost, that meant all of his INFORMATION was lost, and now that meant that THEY were lost, stranded in this forest with no way of-

"Pixel, breathe!" Stephanie exclaimed, standing behind him and putting her hands on his shoulders.

He sucked in a deep breath that he didn't realize he had pushed out, and looked up at Stephanie.  "What do we do now?" he asked, wincing at the broken edge to his voice.

"Well...we still have this compass?" Trixie said tentatively, wiggling it.

"But if we followed that compass in the WRONG DIRECTION," Stephanie said, "Then that means we don't know where we ARE now!"

"It's better than NOTHING!" Trixie said defensively.

"Well...what if we used the rice trick! That works on phones!"

"How are we going to find uncooked rice in an APPLE FOREST, Stephanie??"

"I don't KNOW, do you have any better ideas?"

Pixel was still numb, sucking in breath after breath, listening to the other two bicker and argue.  He couldn't keep up with them, he was too busy processing the magnitude of the loss of all of his data.

And his brain's processor was overheating.

A loud sob ripped from his throat.

The sound froze Stephanie and Trixie in the middle of their near-shouting match, and they turned to look at their juice-soaked friend.

The looks on their faces, of concern and alarm, blurred as Pixel’s vision swam and tears started to fall.

Pixel hated crying. His old friends, from the city, always made fun of him for it, since he always cried over stupid things. Like a broken toy, or a broken laptop. He knew that he was no use to his friends being a sobbing mess on the ground, they had to get back to town!

But he was unable to stop himself. It was just too much.

"Hey, uh, we will find a way back! We're not even that far to begin with!" Trixie said encouragingly.

"B-but," Pixel sniffed, "I could have fixed this.  If I had just been more CAREFUL with my JUICE, we-"

"Stop it," Stephanie said, touching his shoulder.  "We wouldn't even have NEEDED it if we hadn't messed up the route in the first place. We're all to blame for messing this up.  Maybe, we took too many steps.  Maybe, we went in the wrong direction.  Maybe, we did the math wrong when we created the map in the first place! We messed up together, and we will figure out what to do together,” she said, holding out an apple.

"Yeah, don't beat yourself up about it," came Trixie's voice from somewhere behind Stephanie. "We are all smart and resourceful and we GOT this. Somehow."

Pixel accepted the apple, and took a bite, smiling at the taste of friendship and solidarity. "Thanks," he said, with watery eyes.

"You're welcome," came Trixie's voice again, which Pixel had finally registered was coming from in the branches of one of the apple trees, "I picked it from the high branches just for you." she sniffed haughtily, and turned to climb higher in the tree.

"Where are you going?" Stephanie asked.

"I'm gonna poke my head outta the top, and see if I can see the town from here. We'll make a NEW map, and follow a NEW bearing, and it's gonna be a BILLION times better than the first one!" she announced, as her head popped out of the canopy.

"Well, I can't see the town from-" she cut herself off with an excited gasp. "Is THAT-"

"What?" Stephanie asked, picking up the change in tone, "What is it??"

"It's-it's SPORTACUS' AIRSHIP!" Trixie yelled, waving her arm frantically with all her might. "HEEEEEELP!!!!" she screeched into the air.

Pixel and Stephanie climbed up adjacent trees, the gadgets laying forgotten on the ground, as they waved for Sportacus in the sunlight too. "HELP!! HELP!!!"

The enormous ship paused in the air, as if it heard them, and slowly, miraculously, turned, picking up speed as it headed in their direction.

Pixel was about ready to cry again, but this time from relief. They were going to make it home!   He scrambled back down the tree, throwing his juice-stained electronics back into his backpack, and went back up to await their rescue.

By the time he poked his head out from among the ripening apples, Sportacus' ship was directly over them, giving them some very-needed shade. The platform lowered, and Pixel could faintly see the outline of Sportacus' head and hat.

"Would you three like a ride?" he called down, the smile evident in his voice.

"YES PLEASE!" they chorused as one.

"Then climb aboard! LADDER!" he called again, and the white ladder descended down to tree level.

After their long, sunny hike, climbing up a ladder in the shade seemed like a piece of cake.

"Thanks Sportacus!" said Stephanie, passing by him into the airship.

"Thank you!" Trixie said, with more earnestness than usual.

"Yeah, thanks!" he said himself, as he was finally hoisted into the interior of the ship.

"No problem!” Sportacus said, raising the platform and backflipping off the pole. "Water!"

Three water bottles shot out of the wall, and Sportacus kicked them all directly into the kid's hands.

Stephanie and Trixie immediately launched into regaling Sportacus with the tale of their failed expedition, while Pixel quietly sat on the ground, sipping his water.  Now that they were safe and on their way back to town, there was nothing stopping him from thinking about his ruined electronics.

"Pixel," came Sportacus' voice to interrupt his thoughts, "You seem rather...down for someone who is heading home after a very long day out."

Pixel sighed. "I know, Sportacus, and I'm SO glad that you rescued us, but...I'm still kind of sad. I didn't just spill juice on my GPS, I spilled it on my LAPTOP, which means that a lot of my art and projects are gone. And I don't have enough money to replace it!"

Sportacus' face softened into a look of sympathy. "It is hard to lose something like that, Pixel," he said, putting a comforting hand on his shoulder. "But, even though this happened, remember that you are not going through this alone.  Your friends will ALWAYS be on your side!" he said, grinning as he jumped into the pilot seat, pedaling them home.

As always, Sportacus was right. His friends DID make him feel better. Comforting him, even when they still thought that they were all hopelessly lost.  Many of the people that he had called his friends before would have just called him a crybaby, but his friends here in LazyTown were true friends.

He sniffed. It wouldn't be fun, being without his laptop for the time it would take to save up for a new one, but...at least he had his friends with him.

-

"Pixel!" Stephanie called, running over to him.

"Oh hi, Stephanie!" Pixel smiled cheerily.  He hadn't seen her since their hike a few days prior.

"Well, first of all...I found out where we went wrong!" she said, brandishing the map.

“We ended here,” she pointed, “and we were supposed to end here.”

“Wow, we were pretty far off," Pixel observed. "Did you figure out why?"

“I think so," Stephanie said, "It's because I measured the length of MY paces instead of yours! I'm taller than you, so it just made the lengths all messed up!"

Pixel looked back at the map.  "Am I really THAT much shorter than you?" he sighed, looking down at his legs.

"I dunno," Stephanie shrugged, "There was also the compass pointing in the wrong direction thing, and I CAN'T figure that one out."

“Hm," Pixel considered, looking at the ground.

"Oh well! We should try it again sometime!" Stephanie said, more brightly.

“Sure! But I am WATERPROOFING my GPS this time!” Pixel said with a shaky smile.

"About that," Stephanie said, shuffling her feet. "Did you get a new laptop yet?"

Pixel flipped up his visor and rubbed at his face.  

“No, not yet," he said sadly. "I just...wish that didn't happen, you know? Now I'm pinned to my desktop if I want to do anything! I lost the progress I made on three of my big projects! I don't have any of the sprite art I was working on! I can't...I can't CONTACT you guys online if I go out of town!” his eyes filled with tears threatening to spill over again. “I just...this SUCKS, Stephanie!”

She nodded solemnly. “It does. I'm sorry, Pixel.”

They stood there for a moment in silence, until Stephanie cleared her throat.

"Hey, Pixel..." Stephanie said, uncertainly. "I...I told Bessie about what happened on the hike, and...and I know she has a billion old phones and I asked her if you could use this one and she said yes," she said in a rush, holding out a smooth device.

Pixel took it, and held down the power button.  After about ten seconds, a light popped up on the (slightly cracked) screen.

"She said you could sort of use it for documents, and spreadsheets, and internet, and...all that stuff," she mumbled. "But I thought, you could use it to email us when you go out of town!"

Pixel inspected it. "This is an Apollo Taurus, first generation," he said slowly, "It was released to the public 6 years ago, and was one of the first smartphones with 3G capabilities, AND one of the first smartphones to unveil an over-4.5 inch screen."

 Even in the time it took him to say all that, the loading screen was still going, a bright "TAURUS" flashing up at him.

"Th-thank you so much!" Pixel said, smiling brightly.

"You like it? It's...really old, and probably really slow, and it can't really hold a cha-" Pixel cut off her uncertain babbling by gripping her in the tightest hug imaginable.

Because he couldn't care less if she had handed him a tin can and a string, he still would have felt the same joy as he was feeling at that moment. The fact that she even gave what she could...it was not only enough, but above and beyond.  He tried to say that through the hug, and the way she squeezed him back, he was pretty sure she understood.