Skip to main content

Death of a Royal

 Prince Philip dead at age 99. It's all over the news today. I'm sure there'll be dozens of touching tributes to this man. He obviously led a full life. 99 years. Can you imagine? He also led a life of privilege and prestige because, well, he was royal. Royalty. In this modern day and age, we still have kings, queens, princes, and princesses who are revered and honored because they are royal. It's laughable to me. Royal people are just rich people who, somewhere along the line in history, had a title bestowed upon them or just simply had a great-great-great-great-great grandfather who declared himself King. There's no such thing as royal blood. We know this as a scientific fact. And yet millions of people in Britain swoon over Queen Elizabeth and the rest of the royal family. While they have no real political power, they have plenty of influence and are still included in various ceremonial/political events. As if they were something special. Millions of British subjects will argue they are. They're not. They're just incredibly rich, privileged people who genuinely think (most of them, anyway) they are better than everyone else. They're royal. Yeah. OK. We have a similar thing going on here in America with famous actors, singers, athletes, and super-rich people. Or how about the people, like the Kardashians, who are just famous for being famous. Yeah. Pretty stupid, if you ask me. All these people with all this money -ungodly sums of money- and millions of people idolize them for being rich. Shouldn't we be evaluating or honoring people for what they've done to further this human race rather than how much money they've managed to pack away or how many headlines they manage to generate in the news for utterly stupid things. I guess not. 

So, I'm not sure what's worse; all these phony "royal" people being honored and revered because of a meaningless title or all of these rich, famous people being idolized for how much money they have rather than how much character they have. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Observations from the Front Lines

Observations from the front lines of the COVID-19 Pandemic. We're all on the front lines. We're all in this together. Granted some are in much worse situations than others. Everyone in my family still has a job to go to except for my 15-year-old daughter. She worked at a shirt and souvenir shop in Annapolis that has decided to close for the next couple of weeks. Months? The husband-wife owners of the shop are still trying to plot their way forward. The wife had another full-time job that she was just laid off from because of this pandemic. Like a one-two punch combination, now she and her husband are forced to close their shop and their only other source of income. They have two small kids and they're certainly not financially well off, by any stretch of the imagination. My wife's side gig as a professional face painter has, of course, come to a screeching halt. We were just coming into the busy season for face painting. The days leading up to and including St. Patrick...

The End

 I've been thinking a lot about the end. My end. I'm currently over in Sweden with my wife. The purpose of this visit was supposed to be to celebrate 20 years of marital bliss and see some of her family. A chance to take it easy for a while. That was the purpose until my wife's stepmother, Monica, suddenly passed away at the beginning of August. We had already purchased our plane tickets for the end of September and it would've been expensive to try to change the flights. Plus, I couldn't take off of work any earlier than we had already planned for. So, with my wife's halfsister's help, we arranged to have Monica cremated and then planned for the funeral to take place when we got to Sweden.  Monica had no children, but my wife considers her more of a mom than her biological mom. Monica had cancer and we all knew she would never be cured of it, but she had been responding very well to treatments and we were both looking forward to spending some quality time w...

You'd think we would've figured this out by now.

 If it's one thing humans are incredibly good at, it's killing their fellow human beings. We don't need much of a reason most times and there's certainly not much forethought, logic, or reasoning involved before we start firing bullets and missiles, dropping bombs, and deploying deadly drones. Whether it's a lone gunman pissed off at someone or something or an entire nation pissed off at another nation or group of people; rest assured, heads will roll and bodies will drop. And when it's all said and done and there are dead and wounded everywhere, absolutely nothing will be resolved. In fact, it will only lead to more anger, misunderstanding, kneejerk reactions and, yes, more killing. Our history books are full of these accounts of man killing man whether it's revenge, holy war, or self-preservation. You'd think after seeing these killings repeated century after century after century for the same old weak and tired reasons, we'd be able to learn to st...