Man changes his surroundings (not always for the better) Bemoaning poverty doesn"t come cheap

On Sunday, the entire country celebrated a wedding. Alina is getting married, there is a wedding in the neighborhood! Normally, this is the kind of event that only concerns the relatives and friends of the lucky bride. But when the groom is a major businessman, who is a shareholder in a football club, and his godfather is even richer, and a shareholder in another, even bigger football club, the wedding first turns into prime time news and then into a disgusting media circus. The extensive coverage began a few weeks in advance, in order to entice the public, and the excitement had been growing by the hour. Even the most insignificant piece of information, some of it rather private, was delivered to the public with an attention to detail that you"d be hard pressed in different circumstances: the price of the food and drinks, the bridal gown, the suit of the groom and of the godfather, where the fabric was brought from, where the salt came from, how much money was spent on a Cuban lady who was going to roll enough cigars for an army, the presents that were offered, where the marriage and the honeymoon would take place, how many butterflies would be set free after the religious ceremony, how tall the cake would be and who would be singing live by the pool. Knowing all that, you could be happy in the knowledge that there was nothing you"d missed. With excess being the norm nowadays, one needs a strong ability to focus to realize that this entire story is getting out of hand.

However, the entire thing starts to fall apart when you see footage from the wedding, interspersed with images of the modest meals that the wretched souls have to get by on. The speeches of most of the guests of Realitatea TV were designed to appeal to the many, criticizing the opulence of the wedding while at the same time bemoaning the fate of the underprivileged. After all, it was all about the wedding of a man who doesn"t hold any public position, who was spending his own money and whose businesses were legal, until proven otherwise. Rather than vituperate, journalists should try and investigate whether his fortune was gained by honest means, but the tent where the wedding guests were partying isn"t the place to look for clues about that. It"s true, one would be inclined to take the easy way out and think that criticizing is the right thing to do, after all, what"s with all the waste? But once you see the TV station covering the wedding from the ground, from an elevated area and from a helicopter, you start to wonder whether they would be well advised to keep quiet. Isn"t this another form of excess, in an attempt to show just how wasteful the rich are? It is strange to say the least, having a TV channel which allegedly cares about the many, spending an insane amount on covering the wedding, instead of donating the money to some retirement home or orphanage, especially when they are so good at playing the charity card. The bride and groom would have been more than entitled to film the helicopter of Realitatea TV, and to then complain on another channel about how much money was spent to show on TV what dishes were served at the wedding, while seniors can"t afford medication. The fact that Realitatea TV had the second largest daily rating on Sunday proves that in fact things that their tactic worked very well.

To be fair, this kind of discrepancy isn"t an isolated one. Such hubris is seen in other, bigger greater media outlets and is for the most part ignored. The already famous show " I am dancing for you", which is a true goldmine for Pro TV, is a very good example. Domestic celebrities compete with someone picked from among the less fortunate, whom they let win. The stars in question are miles above their less fortunate competitor in terms of living standard, and the amounts spent on producing the show would definitely be better spent elsewhere. This goes for many other TV shows that are in the tear-jerking business.

It becomes increasingly obvious that the tears that the televisions shed on the shoulders of the unfortunate are very expensive. And that goes for politicians too: it would cost a lot less if they stopped caring so much for us and they simply all of them do their jobs.