Society’s topsy-turvy values?
According to the Telegraph, Real-Madrid want to offer a record £200 million plus for Gareth Bale, who plays for Spurs in the English Premier League. Just two weeks ago it was £80 million!
“It is understood that Tottenham Hotspur are holding out for £104 million for the 24-year-old forward who is pushing hard for a move this summer. In addition Real Madrid want to pay Bale a salary of £7.8 million a year – net of tax – over a proposed six-year contract, ” says correspondent Jason Burt.
This doesn’t include sponsorship fees by advertisers, which could easily bring his earnings over £15 million. Maybe £20 million, no one knows for sure.
I celebrate Bale’s personal success at reaching the pinnacle of his profession, and rewarded for that in terms of both prestige and money. When we look at the current paradigm, we can easily see that most of humanity is working to have more money, so we can enjoy a better life, are we not?
Yet what kind of society have we created, where we see a company pay this type of exorbitant fee for a footballer and then we say that we cannot find the money to pay for the healthcare for millions of people? In the UK, many hospitals are closing, nurses and doctors are quite often overworked and underpaid, and many welfare benefits are being cut for those “slackers” who should “get a job”… cuts that may even see whole families thrown out onto the street.
It seems that our values are a little topsy-turvy, are they not? We are creating bigger and bigger divides between the rich and the poor, the “haves” and the “have nots”.
Shall we use the usual justifications, such as “that’s just the way life is…” or “that’s the way the cookie crumbles…” or “to the winner goes the spoils…”? Or, perhaps we should look more closely at what, exactly, has created these monster earnings?
And we should definitely look at what we can do to create a world which is not so greedy and out of touch with its own needs. In the UK, so many people (mainly men but some women too) care more about how their team is doing, than how the economy is doing, or how their neighbour is doing. That’s a fact!
The Premier League competition formed when the FA Premier League broke away from The Football League in 1992 to take advantage of a lucrative TV rights’ deal which will be worth £3 BILLION (that’s 9 zeros after the first digit!) as of 2013–14, with BSkyB and BT Group securing the rights to broadcast!
The Premier League is currently the most-watched football league in the world, broadcast to 643 million homes, with a potential TV audience of 4.7 billion people.
With an audience of 4.7 billion, big mainstream advertisers (think Coca Cola, MacDonalds, Barclays Bank and so forth) will pay a lot to keep brainwashing their audience into buying their goods and services. It is a sorry fact that if someone sees an advert enough times, they will unconsciously reach for the product through a subconscious imprint.
For example, the brand LYNX always links itself to SEX and makes no apologies for it. Why? So that guys will associate themselves with the guy who gets the HOT LOOKING GIRL IN SKIMPY UNDERWEAR by putting on Lynx Deodorant. You may laugh – but they do it because it works.
In the Conversations with God series, God said to Neale Donald Walsch that beyond a certain income, the rest of a person earnings should go into a collective pool, to be used for the highest good of society. It gave a figure of around $20 million.
I think that’s fair, don’t you? In fact, it’s more than fair.
Hospitals, schools and so forth would benefit from the earnings taken above that threshold, and the contributor would be recognised for his/her vital contribution towards his/her fellow human beings.
It seems we are greatly reluctant to do this – it would go against “free enterprise” and inherent “freedoms”. Yet, it seems to sit with us just fine that over half the world’s population is earning below the breadline, and DYING.
If it isn’t okay, we seem incapable of doing anything about it. We seem incapable of standing up and saying the current paradigm is not fair nor sustainable.
Many people will ignorantly blurt out that these footballers – as well as other athletes, movie stars and so on – deserve what they earn. They are “paid what they’re worth”, is the reasoning. “They are talented”, will be the answer! Yet are they more talented than the hospital nurses and doctors we have? Are they any more talented than the school teachers who educate our children?
Is it any wonder that children growing up don’t want a “real job”?
And, do any footballers, or professional athletes, mainly young men in their 20s, need to pocket more than £10 million a year?
With all due respect to “free enterprise”, I really don’t think so…
(Jaime Tanna is the founder of Energy Therapy and an active Reiki Master and Spiritual Mentor, Healer and Teacher. Together with his wife Jennifer, their unifying vision is to empower others through spiritual education and energy-based healing treatments, to help them become aware of their true natures, and to live more joyfully and consciously. You can visit their website at www.energytherapy.biz)
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