I like CBS Sunday Morning, but once in a while one of their feel good stories doesn’t make me feel so good. Last week there was the story of a family of rich folks who were feeling a bit guilty about being rich. In the story the yuppie daughter looks out the car window and sees a fancy car on one side and a homeless man on the other. She has the revelation that if only the person driving the fancy car drove a less fancy car, maybe the homeless man could have some of the money.
That sounds like a nice Pay It Forward kind of story, but then it veers off in a direction that pissed me off. Our rich family sells their two million dollar house and gives half the money to a charity doing work in Africa. How, exactly, is that going to help the homeless of Atlanta?
This is one more story about rich people feeling good about themselves and showing what a bunch of swells they are in the process. If you want to sell your house and use the money for the homeless of Atlanta, that would have been a better story. But it doesn’t even say the little rich girl rolled down the window and gave the man five dollars for a happy meal.
Most of the comments on CBS Sunday morning agree with me and many are outraged that these people are making money from book sales and are patting themselves on the back on national television.
It’s a free country and if these people want to give all their money to Africa and live under a bridge themselves, more power to them. But the way the story was setup, they look like a bunch of selfish tools out form their fifteen minutes of fame.
Tags: car window, cbs, cbs news, cbs sunday morning, charity, fame, fancy car, fifteen minutes, five dollars, happy meal, homeless man, little rich girl, national television, pay it forward, revelation, rich folks, swells, two million, work in africa, yuppie

Annie Proulx wrote The Shipping News, one of my all time favorite novels, and I have not been to impressed with her since. I just watched Brokeback Mountain, set for immortality as one of the few movies that starred Heath Ledger. The movie also has one of the those rare screenplays written by Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove fame. The rest of the cast has the usual Hollywood types of Randy Quaid, Anne Hathaway, and Jake Gyllenhaal.


