Rock and Roll on the Road
You might have read in some of my past articles, that I had
the opportunity, in my childhood, to go on tour with the Beatles band. I have to tell you the circumstances might
have not been the most positive thing at the time. (as to why the exact circumstances escape
me). Suffice it to say I was not a genius
in either traveling or knowing what to do with myself when just moping around
the house. After a while, the pain got to
be a little obvious and one of the group members, who found inspiration for his music from
the daily news, commissioned me to look for interesting articles in the papers that would be good to convert into popular song. (Evidence the
song: The Beatles: A Day in the Life).
Reading the Funnies: The Task at Hand
So, the reason I mentioned the above is that I was not naturally inclined to the rock and roll lifestyle. I was also not inclined to read the papers with a great deal of understanding about the importance of stuff. There seemed to me,
to be a lot of articles talking about the uneven distribution of wealth and how
the wealthy were so disgusting because they spent all that money on themselves
and didn’t share it all with the poor.
If I told you that the Hippy movement came to be because
some of the things that happened turned out to be amusing, would that surprise
you? Suffice it to say at a certain
point of time, we got a huge amount of money rather fast, and as my friend Jonathan
Crow would do many years later, the first thing that the Beatles wanted to do,
was not to have bread and change their fantastic poor and intellectual
lifestyle. In a word, we wanted to get rid of the money fast.
The 1% and Greed
SO, as I mentioned, there were a lot of articles talking
about the rich being greedy and the poor having no money. So, we decided to do
the right thing and distribute all this bread to the neediest people in the
world. According to the paper at the time, the largest amount of human poverty
and misery was in India (or thereabouts, like Bangladesh). So off we went to
these places to find the most destitute place of all to share all the money
equally. I remember we stopped off at Bangladesh which had a great famine to take
some pictures of the starving children and I being young preferred to go home
with some beautiful shots of the very stately Palace. Some told me to stop it
and took away my camera at that time. But that was on the way I believe.
The Coola District?
So off we went to India to look for the Coola district. That was where one article stated, the most
poverty was concentrated. First problem. We couldn't find out where the Coola
district was. We made a stop in Bombay and we asked for directions. No Coola
district. So we asked for a really poor neighborhood and lots of babies. There is
a high infant mortality rate and that means that they are super-poor. Also if
their parents have not much money, I guess. Anyways, so you are following me?
By this time a fair amount of money had been spent. Actually, an enormous amount
of money had spent. So we got some money people, accountants and the like, as
well as some very rich intelligent people (monarchy) to get out their
calculators and check out how much it costs to distribute the money, equally to
the poor. Like I said we had a spent
already a fair amount of money and we had a huge budget of millions of dollars
but we were getting wary. So, the gauges were taken out and we took to the task as
hand and we started dividing the money we had to distribute to the poor.
The Calculators were Out and Working
At this point the calculators were out and working as tasks
and people were delegated, the food was purchased and prepared, the place to eat was arranged
and off we went. Not much into the exercise
the whole budget was spent. This is an enormous amount of money. The sum of
fifty-five million dollars comes to mind. We really tried to distribute the
money to the poor. And we had a lot of very bright advisors.
Internationally. In the end, the whole
process was so expensive that it cost much more money to get the stuff to the
poor (which was food) then it would have cost to just let the rich use it. And this was in getting the task arranged. We
couldn’t complete it. If you think you
could do better than let me know. And do it.
Comments
Post a Comment