Wasted Lives

We can all see, around us, a lot of wasted lives. The potheads and petty criminals, the scroungers, the beggars and the good-for-nothing, that sort of people. They are on trains and buses, on the street and on underground carriages.

You look at them and think: “what a waste”.

But there is, at the opposite end, another kind of wasted life. Less evident, for sure, but much more insidious. I am talking of the wasted lives of some extremely rich people.

Let us say that you have amassed a huge fortune through business acumen, intelligence, resilience in the face of adversity, and sheer hard work. You are clearly very capable, and now your vast wealth allows you to be an authentic force for good. You could – besides clothing the poor and give food to the hungry, which I am sure you do – start donating to worthy causes: those who fight against abortion, or the rampant perversion endemic in our lives. You could help countless people to discover Christianity, helping the work of evangelization of many priests and missionaries with a brave and devout heart. You could help stemming the tide of irreligiousess in our own Countries.

There is an awful lot you could do.

Instead, you bow to the mantras of modern Western stupidity, and make of an imaginary environmental emergency the focus of your charitable activity. You support abortion, and all sorts of perversions. You even apologise for things you have done right in the past, but are inconvenient to you now that you are embarking in your next vanity project.

Why? Because you think that you can buy the Presidency of the United States. And if not, you still think it worth it to allow yourself this last, big push for the aggrandizement of your own ego. One or two billions of dollars spent on the endeavour would be nothing to you. You have more than fifty of those, and at 77 you know your own mortality is staring at you in the face with alarming frequency. Heck, it’s clearly the last go at the toy you want. So you apologise, say what people want to hear, and prepare to set up the most expensive electoral machine the world has ever seen.

In the meantime, Mr Bloomberg, around one million babies will be killed in their mother’s womb in the electoral year alone, and they need people like you to put your financial muscle on the side of their little lives.

You are rich and powerful, Mr Bloomberg. You are certainly intelligent and business savy.

But to me and to many like me, who do not measure people with the scale of the world, you are – in what really matters – not so different from the pothead and the scroungers.

Because, Mr Bloomberg, you are clearly a wasted life in the eyes of Christianity.