Ice Buckets & Oracles

Ice Buckets & Oracles



Let me confess that, aside from donating time or money, I rarely understand the odd things done on behalf of charities. For instance, even decades ago when I was an advertising copywriter, my fellow workers would often ask me to donate money based on how far they walked or ran on the weekend. I understood the part about donating, but I couldn’t fathom why the distance they covered should have anything to do with the amount.

These days, a great many people are allowing themselves to be doused with a large bucket of ice water as a way to help finance one cause or another. Although I admit to experiencing a certain joie de vivre each and every time I see some left-wing show biz celebrity being given an ice bath, I fail to see the connection to charity.

Am I to assume that some people have added being assaulted with ice cubes to such bucket list items as enjoying the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower, wind-surfing in Hawaii and helping the Obamas pack up and move out of the White House?

That reminds me that I have some good news to pass along. It seems that two Hawaiian councilmen decided to name a local beach in Barack Obama’s honor, but backed down in the face of public outrage. So it seems that contrary to the popular notion that everyone in Hawaii is a stoned, leftist, slacker, there are still some stoned slackers who haven’t entirely lost their minds in the Aloha State.

One poor soul who must still be addicted to marijuana, even if he may have kicked the nicotine habit, is Obama. How else to explain that in an election year when every Democratic candidate is trying his or her best to distance themselves from the White House, he decides to sabotage their campaigns by announcing, “I’m not on the ballot this time, but my policies are”? What’s next? Will he begin funneling the loot he collects at his endless fund-raisers to the Republican National Committee?

Moving on, I have never understood the objection many people have to capital punishment. I mean, assuming that they themselves are not residing on Death Row, why would anyone object to justice being meted out to cold-blooded killers?

I know that some folks claim that the state should not be engaged in the taking of life. To me, that means they’re so morally dysfunctional that they equate the taking of an innocent life with the taking of a guilty one.

In order to be consistent, would these self-righteous schmucks also object to executing the jihadists beheading Americans, Brits and Kurds, over in Iraq? If not, why not? And if so, what difference does it make to them where the butchery takes place, and what possible reason can they have for punishing murderers in the Middle East more harshly than murderers in, say, the Midwest?

Something else I can’t figure out is why it’s expected to take an entire year to train the Free Syrian Army so they can fight ISIL on our behalf. After all, these are the very same people who have been doing a decent job of fighting Assad’s far more formidable army for the past three years!

Finally, when I ridicule Warren Buffet, it’s not because I’m envious of his enormous wealth. The truth is I would like to be a little richer than I am, but not as rich as Buffet. For one thing, I would never want to devote that much of my life to the accumulation of money. For another thing, I would never want to be 84 years old and have to spend so much time keeping track of it and making sure nobody is stealing it while I’m distracted, busy sleeping or having a tuna fish sandwich.

But when the so-called “Oracle of Omaha” states that Hillary Clinton will win in 2016, I find myself wondering why anyone takes him seriously. I have no problem with his making a prediction, even one with which I happen to disagree. The problem is because he’s very wealthy, a great many people actually think he knows what he’s talking about. It even explains why he’s called the Oracle of Omaha, instead of the Rich Old Coot from Nebraska.

It will obviously come as a thunder bolt to some, but being rich only means that some individuals have the knack for making money, just as some have an ear for music and others have a knack for wiggling their ears.

Bill Gates knows a lot about computers, Donald Trump knows a lot about real estate and Ted Turner knows a lot about sailboats and bourbon, but grown-ups are being childish when they take them seriously when they prattle on about matters outside their expertise. It’s like those young dopes who take to heart every dire warning uttered by Matt Damon about global warming or accept as gospel the nonsense Sean Penn spews forth on the evils of capitalism.

In short, rich people know how to make money in the same way that beavers know how to build dams.

But only a schnook would ask a beaver to predict the outcome of a presidential election or refer to one as an oracle.

By Burt Prelutsky