Translate

Most of what I've written has been published as e-books and is available at Amazon. Match Play is a golf/suspense novel. Dust of Autumn is a bloody one set in upstate New York. Prairie View is set in South Dakota, with a final scene atop Rattlesnake Butte. Life in the Arbor is a children's book about Rollie Rabbit and his friends (on about a fourth grade level). The Black Widow involves an elaborate extortion scheme. Happy Valley is set in a retirement community. Doggy-Dog World is my memoir. And ES3 is a description of my method for examining English sentence structure.
In case anyone is interested in any of my past posts, an archive list can be found at the bottom of this page. I'd appreciate any feedback you may have by sending me an e-mail note--jertrav33@aol.com. Thanks for your interest.

Tuesday, November 15

Childhood's End

I heard on ESPN radio that the Dodgers offered Matt Kemp, a free agent this year, an eight-year contract worth $160 million. Whoa! That’s a lot of money. The Florida Marlins’ entire payroll last season was $50 million. And now the Dodgers are willing to pay out to one player $20 million for one year, and then seven years thereafter. These numbers just don’t make any sense. The NBA players and owners are squabbling over $5 billion television revenues, each wanting more than half the pie, neither willing to give in to the other. I taught for thirty-three years for a total of about $800,000, and a professional basketball player sitting waaay down at the end of the bench on an NBA team, playing an average of two minutes a game, makes over a million a year. Something is out of balance. I’m not complaining, mind you. I’ve had a very good life, better than 99.9% of the people on earth. No complaints here. I just can’t understand why some people need to make hundreds of times more than they need. Why does Matt Kemp need $160 million? Why do CEO's need hundreds of millions a year just for heading large corporations? No wonder we’re having demonstrations all over the country asking the same questions. I still look forward to a time as seen in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End when money is a forgotten concept, when all needs through advanced technology are provided for, when no one has to work to sustain life, when work is a privilege and not a necessity, when each of us can use our time to pursue creative and intellectual goals. I hope we get to that point before we destroy ourselves.

No comments:

Blog Archive