The one post about the Royal Wedding you probably don’t want to read

It seems like the world is divided into 2 camps concerning the Royal Wedding: the group that thinks the kind of money being spent on it is shameful and a waste, and the group that thinks a royal wedding should cost whatever it costs.

The first group argues: “When there are so many people unemployed, hungry, and tornadoes have just done in excess of a billion dollars damage, how can anyone justify a wedding that costs in the neighborhood of $50 million?”

The second group replies: “It’s a ROYAL wedding. Shut up.”

I’d like to propose a third group, and invite you to become a part of it.  My group is the “before we start throwing the Queen under the bus and telling her how to spend her country’s money, maybe we should look at ourselves first and that will probably cause us to shut up.”

I admit that I was finding myself in the first group.  I’m not exactly sure why, but it could have been because I was growing sick of the wall-to-wall Royal Wedding coverage interrupted periodically with distracting images of destroyed homes in Alabama.  At any rate, I kept finding myself getting more and more frustrated with what seems to be a total waste of – or at least, misuse of – money that seems to be in short supply.

I say seems to be, because when I did a little research about the spending in our own country, I found myself standing face to face with some harsh words from Jesus.  Apparently the money isn’t in short supply; we’re just on the short end of knowing how to spend it.

This week-end is the NFL draft, and in the last 10 years $3.5 billion in guaranteed money has been paid out to first round draft picks. $2 billion of that has gone to players taken in the first 10 picks.  That means that every year the NFL pays out $350 million to 32 players.  Every year.

“Sure, but that’s the owners’ money.  What’s that got to do with me?”

I thought that, too, until I realized that we’re the consumers.  The money for the players comes from the ticket sales, food and beverage sales, merchandise sales and television contracts worth more because we watch.  I’m not sure that I’m lobbying for us to stop, I’m just saying that we can’t blow that number off by saying it’s the owners’ problem.

Need more proof?  I’ve got it, and I’m pretty sure you won’t want to read it.  In fact, this long sentence is really a meaningless way to stall so that you have enough time to click away before your eye wanders down to the next paragraph.  Oops, too late.  Well, I did warn you…

There are 122 million “consumer units” in America.  Basically one unit is one household, although not always.  But to keep the math simple, we’ll go with it because it’s close enough.  We get that number by dividing the population of the country by 2.5, which is the average size of one of those units.  Still with me?  Here’s the mind blowing part.  According to the stats at the Bureau of Labor, each unit spent close to $3,000 in 2009 on entertainment.

If we do a little math, we find that 122 million times $3,000 means that our country spent $366,000,000,000 in entertainment.

Um, that’s billion.

In other words, all of us in America that are raising a stink about the Royal Wedding are upset about something that costs 1% of 1% of what we throw away in disposable entertainment spending each year.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)

It’s not the big things that matter.  The NFL drafts, the Royal Weddings, heck, even the launching of the Space Shuttle today that will cost $450 million.  It’s the smaller things, the $30 here and $20 there, that over time, collectively, add up to a figure so staggering it blows our minds.

Look at these words:

Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes, that ruin our vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom. (Song of Songs 2:15, emphasis mine)

It is the little things that are out of control, and instead of thumbing our noses at the country on the other side of the big pond, perhaps we should take a longer look at ourselves and decide what we can do here in order to help our own.  Imagine if every consumer unit decided to cut their entertainment back only 10% and used it instead to help the people hurting around us?  Do that math and you’d see that, without even missing much, we’d have over $36 billion dollars to use to attack homelessness, unemployment, and disaster relief.

All because we got the little foxes under control.

When was the last time you considered where your money goes?  What are the little foxes in your consumer unit?

Who do you know that needs help?  How much could you give toward that need by making just a small cut in your entertainment spending?