Michael Jackson's memorial service will be taking place tomorrow at Los Angeles' Staples Center, and promises to be a massive spectacle. Streets will be blocked off, a basketball arena will be filled to capacity, and tickets to the service are being scalped for tens of thousands of dollars (in a depressed economy, no less). It will be a circus the likes of which the world has never seen. And if that's how the Jacksons want to honor the King of Pop, that's up to them. I have no problem with that.
I do have a problem, however, with the way this memorial service is being paid for: not by the Jackson family, or by Michael's estate, or by his plethora of obscenely wealthy friends, but by the City of Los Angeles.
In case you glossed over that, let me repeat it: A private citizen's memorial service is being paid for, 100%, by taxpayer dollars. Millions of them.
If you live in LA, this should piss you off big time. This kind of squandering is not only incredibly irresponsible, it's practically criminal. Heck, it almost makes San Diego look pretty good by comparison.
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It's going to be even worse tomorrow. When the Lakers won that basketball thingy, there were riots. And that was for winning. The preliminaries say a million people from across the globe. Either way, Los Angeles is going to get was they deserve.
ReplyDeletenot to mention the fact that SELLING the tickets could have paid for the thing.
ReplyDeleteThat's a valuable lesson that the administration must remember to ignore when rationing out carbon emissions permits to campaign donors