The Holidays, A Body Gotta Live, and Respectable Pursuits

The holidays bring out the best in people. Watching the Sacramento Kings play the Boston Celtics on NBA Pass tonight, The Kings (as part of the half-time broadcast) were showing clips of their 'holiday' public service. The Kings and their owners, The Maloof family, along with other major corporations wanting to take advantage of tax write-offs and a chance for creating positive public relations, are very generous during the Holidays. In this 'community service segment' our heroes were going out in the poorer communities giving away Christmas trees, complete with ornaments to decorate them, as well as holiday meals prepared and ready to eat, 'donated' by Raley's\BelAir (one of the nicer supermarket chains in Northern California). Those meals aren' t cheap (my buddy Guy bought one at Thanksgiving and told me what he paid), but they are a nice meal. I feel relief for those few lucky poor people! I'm a sensitive person.
Stories of holiday goodwill and kindness make me tear up, normally. But there's more to the story... Well, see... the poor people weren't having these gifts delivered to their homes. Instead they were driving up in their cars and waiting in line. Then, with cameras rolling (wouldn't want to be generous and not have it be recorded\acknowledged, huh), the players delivered the necessities of a joyous holiday to the people waiting in their cars, who (as one happy recipient explained) "would not have been able to afford Christmas without the generosity of the Kings organization."
I guess I would have been happier for this 'poor' women except she didn't look older then thirty, nor was she unkempt, or portraying the appearance of someone downtrodden. And I noticed her nails were manicured in holiday colors (seemingly professionally) on the hand gripping the steering wheel of her newish mini-van. I wondered what the criteria was to qualify as poor and pull your car into line. Obviously a recent manicure didn't disqualify you. I could tell that owning a car didn't disqualify you either, because all these people had cars. I noticed that all the cars in line looked newer than mine too. These people gave me the impression the 'poor' had changed in the fourteen months since I left California.
The second recipient was driving what looked like a new Lincoln Navigator, which is a 10 mile per gallon SUV. I'm glad the Kings organization went out to the poor neighborhoods to play Santa, otherwise those poor people might have not been able to afford the gas to receive the necessities for Christmas. Thanks to the Kings organization they can drive in style and celebrate the birth of Jesus. Hallelujah!
Funnily, I didn't see any shopping carts in the line. I was under the impression that is the usual status symbol for the poor. Maybe those poor people got caught in traffic. Just as well, they wouldn't have had a roof to tie their tree on, or put under, for that matter. Those poor people are generally a little too poor for good PR video anyway. Though they know where the shelters are, it looked like they were completely unaware of this charitable event. In that respect, the Holidays bring out the worst in people too, unfortunately.
Every year there is the perennial story of the poor family robbed of their Christmas by thieves, and the gnawing moral question of how could anyone be so cruel? The following day, inevitably, will be the story of the public generously donating gifts, food, decorations: all the necessities of the Christmas celebration. All that love for those poor people, makes everybody feel good! This year there was another chapter to that type of story too.
It seems that a former friend of a poor family that was robbed, while sitting in his new SUV at a Kings Community function for the needy, waiting for a free meal and tree, saw the news clip on the overhead tv/dvd player in his Navigator, and notified the authorities that the same family had been "robbed" two years earlier. Ironically, the guy in the SUV thought it was atrocious his acquaintance would lie about his circumstances in order to take advantage of the public's sympathy. Morally, he felt like he had no choice but to expose him , saying, "that out-pouring of public generosity might have found it's way to the truly Poor, had it not been stolen by [his] unscrupulous buddy." So, the moral of the story?
ALWAYS HAVE A SCUMBAG HANDY TO DIVERT ATTENTION FROM YOURSELF
Merry Xmas to One and All

PS The first snow this winter fell today-