All around our country, school districts - ravaged by financial woes - are eliminating high school sports programs. Also going by way of the Dead Sea are art, music, creative writing, and theater programs for our youth.
Then, this morning in the newspaper I read that Amazon's Jeff Bezos spent $24.5 million for a Beverly Hills compound; Sean Parker, of Napster and Facebook fame, dropped $55 mil to buy Ellen DeGeneres's Holmby Hills mansion, and Markus Person, a Swedish tech billionaire spent $70 million for an "epic" custom mansion in Beverly Hills, wow! and it's fitted with iPad controlled fountain, vodka and tequila bars. Double Wow!
Should I be impressed? Should anyone be impressed?
Bezos might have been able to find a pleasant little cottage for, say, two mil. I'm reasonable sure Sean Parker would have found comfort and happiness for 5 million, and, gee, isn't it possible that Persson could have found something in the range of 7 mil, maybe forgo the vodka bar? The three could have followed Justin Yoshimura's example, who spent a paltry 2. 04 million on his Santa Monica home that he only visits on - weekends.
I figure the accumulated savings at approximately 150 million could go a long way toward getting our sports and arts programs back on their feet.
But maybe tech folks don't like sports and art and theater and music and children and education. And how dare I, in a capitalist society, suggest they don't have the right to spend their hard earned cash anyway they want?
I don't get it. I'll never get it. How some people can live conspicuously obscenely consuming. As far as I'm concerned, if you've seen one 20 million dollar mansion, you seen them all. Shame on all of you. One caring high school coach is worth the lot of you put together.
Continuing with the theme of Spring Training:.
Couplet by Donald Hall
When the tall puffy
figure wearing number
nine starts
late for the fly ball,
laboring forward
like a lame truckhorse
startled by a garter snake,
- this old fellow
whose body we remember
as sleek and nervous
as a filly's -
and barely catches it
in his glove's
tip, we rise
and applaud, weeping.
On a green field
we observe the ruin
of even the bravest
body, as Odysseus
wept to glimpse
among shades the shadow
of Achilles.
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