Welcome to the home of the very worst of the meretricious poetasters!
number 66 for 10-4-05:
"I'm Really Enjoying It"
The world's first space tourist docked at the space station recently. CNN and many major news organizations asked him how it felt to spend 20 million dollars for a trip to space.
They asked if he had any regrets.
They asked him if he was scared on takeoff.
They asked him if he was enjoying himself. "I'm really enjoying it," he said.
They did not ask him how the FUCK he could be so incredibly selfish as to squander enough money to raise an entire family on self-aggrandizing hedonistic bullshit.
Twenty million dollars is more money than I will earn in my lifetime. Twenty million dollars is more than my father will have made in his lifetime, adjusted. Twenty million dollars is more than my father, me, and his father will make, all added together, in our lifetimes.
In Darfur, genocide spreads, causing death, destruction, killing innocents.
In the Middle East, religious wars spread poverty, starvation, in death.
In North Korea, there is no power, but there are nuclear weapons.
In Africa, people die of AIDS in unconsciounable number.
More than the population of the United States currently lives without potable water. Many lack appropriate food to survive.
Money could help fix this.
And that's in other countries.
In America, poverty runs rampant. In my own city, almost 20 percent of people over the age of sixty live below the poverty line.
There is food for the poor, but it is high fructose corn syrup in its many and varying forms, and it wears on the body, causes the poor to die younger, fatter.
But even beyond the poor, there are men who work their fingers to the bone for ungrateful families. There are women who beat themselves senseless for a degree that, when they achieve it, will not give them, for their whole life, twenty million dollars. Or their daughter's life. Or their daughter's daughter's life. Or all three combined. If they had a million dollars, if they had five hundred thousand dollars, if they had TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS, many of their daily problems would disappear. It would improve their lives. It would make a real change.
Twenty million dollars is enough money to let two thousand people live for a year. In poverty, yes, but it's enough for food and housing. It's enough for 400 people to live the high life with a 50,000 dollar a year job.
But, more creatively, twenty million dollars is enough to purchase land and build a housing development to offer housing to impoverished families for free for, by my calculations, approximately three hundred families. It wouldn't be roomy. It wouldn't be pretty. But it would definitely be a godsend for a family or a man or a woman living on the street.
Twenty million dollars is twenty three million loaves of bread. Enough to feed the whole of the United States four slices apiece.
Twenty million dollars is two hundred thousand days of labor for the average person making minimum wage...before taxes.
Twenty million dollars is five libraries. One new school. Two without a library or computers. A museum and its first two years of existence. Art galleries. Music Halls. A community center for the elderly. A firehouse. A police station.
Twenty million dollars is enough to print 1.333 million books to teach the ignorant at fifteen dollars a pop. Double that if you print cheap.
Twenty million dollars, for that matter, is the budget of a modest sized town.
It's 100 decent houses, bought straight off the market, for lower income families.
Or it's one man giving a thumbs up from a space station in an action that benefits no one, gives nothing to science, treads on the unconscionable, and personally, wracks me with an inhuman disgust that makes me want to kill this man for his audacity.
I hope he's really enjoying it.
And for once, I wish for a hell that he might burn.
Excuse me. I'm off to eat my small portion of rice for dinner so I can keep being an artist. I may enjoy it.
I hope his fucking craft explodes.
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