From the first second I heard that Kate Middleton and Prince William were getting married, my first reaction was....who cares? As the days were leading up to the wedding and media coverage was amping up and I started hearing more and more about it on tv, the radio, the internet etc. my thoughts were....who cares? When I noticed that google and youtube had stylized their logo's in a royal wedding theme I started to think....someone really cares about this. Though, I still couldn't rap my mind around how people could care about two complete stangers getting married in a place thousands of kilometers away. My stance towards the wedding was that it was ridiculous to congratulate two people who have been extremely wealthy and privelidged from birth for getting together and being rich and privelidged together. Needless to say, I had no intentions to watch the wedding. After I had learned that my mom had erased Trailer Park Boys the Movie to make room on the PVR for 7 hours of wedding porn, it only increased my hatred for the whole thing.
arriving home late from a blues/rock show with my friend, I came home to see my mom sitting and watching the wedding. She was watching just as a crowd of roughly 100,000 people were marching up to the castle to watch William kiss Kate. The atmosphere of the crowd was one of pure elation. The beauty and romance of the whole event had inspired these people in such a way that could only come at a price tag of no less than
$15-$60 million (Maclean's estimate:
http://tinyurl.com/44ogb78 ). Despite the joyous energy of the crowd, fed by the shared love of this particular couple, all I could think of was....how many children in third world countries could that one fly-over cost?
It's hard to balance out your emotions for such a spectacle such as this. On one hand, these people are being inspired by a love story bigger than life. A love story that simply wouldn't have the same gravity behind it without all the lavish jewlerry, expensive jets etc. On the other hand, there are people in the world with problems that most of the 100,000 people in the crowd waiting to watch William kiss Kate on that balcony couldn't even begin to fathom. People with problems that could be solved if only the money for a wedding for two people who are only in their position through coincidence and chance, had been a little less lavish. Like really...
$78,000 for a cake? Where is the starving child in Africa's slice?
