Can You Feel It?

 I know I live in different places than the people about whom I read in the headlines. I am not currently suffering from a shortage of baby formula. But I can feel that. My neighborhood is not being pounded by an invading force's artillery. But I can feel that. My forty billion dollar deal for Twitter is currently "on hold." I can feel that. 

I just feel it in a different way. I believe the feeling for that last one is called "schadenfreude." If you have forty billion dollars to toss around, you might want to lob a few billion at the supply chain crisis that is impacting the baby formula market as well as many other staples. While you're at it, why not go ahead and send some love in the form of ammunition to Ukraine so that they can shoot back? I understand that I just recently suggested that Mister Musk might solve the world's problems by just buying us all a Coke and a smile. I could say that I'm not picking on Elon. 

But I am. 

It's the part of me that is always trying to figure out how to stretch a dollar, when he can simply stack them higher. A stack of one billion dollars would measure over sixty-seven miles high. The edge of the atmosphere, or where Elon and his billionaire buddies keep taking William Shatner, is sixty-two miles away. What I am suggesting here, without the aid of audio-visual aids, is that instead of spending all that money on rocket ships, Elon and his billionaire buddies could just stack up their cash, climb to the top of it, and drift off into space. 

But that's not how Elon thinks. Or anyone else who has the capital to purchase things that don't really exist. Twitter is, fundamentally, nothing but a place to put your thoughts, dreams, and snarky reviews of Marvel movies. While families struggle to find necessities like baby formula, Elon and his billionaire buddies are making up new ways to waste money. Sure, I would be as excited as anyone to ride in Elon's vacuum tube machine from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I like to imagine that someday we will have colonies on the moon, or Mars. Everyone on the planet driving electric vehicles, generated by energy from the sun? That is the sort of thing that forty billion dollars can do. Or it can be waved around like the twenty dollar bill your grandma tucked inside your birthday card. 

I can feel that. And I don't like it.