The latest anti-poverty campaign Live Below The Line challenges people to live below the poverty line for 5 days... or $1.50 a day for food. The goal of the campaign is to help us all better understand how 1.4 billion people in the world live their lives every single day - in profound and extreme poverty. This is a great campaign, and as an ardent foe of wealth inequality, I wholeheartedly support it. What I don't support is excessively wealthy celebrities throwing their public participation behind the campaign. It's offensive, and based on some of the comments floating around the interweb, it offends a whole lot of regular folks.
Some of the celebrity names attaching themselves to this campaign include Ben Affleck, Hugh Jackman, Sophia Bush, Nick Lachey and Josh Groban. Some of them even got a shout-out in a Huffpost article for committing to live on $1.50 for a day. I have to confess I had never heard of Sophia Bush... I thought maybe she was one of George Bush's daughters.
A quick review of the website http://www.celebritynetworth.com/ assesses the net worth of the aforementioned celebrities to be the following:
Sophia Bush: $6 million
Nick Lachey: $20 million
Josh Groban: $30 million
Ben Affleck & Hugh Jackman: a whopping $65 million each
I like Ben Affleck, and I like his movies, and I applaud his social conscience. But Ben Affleck needs to let go of the idea that he's still just like the the rest of us, an average homeboy from Boston. Those days ended long ago, right after he made his first couple million. Exceedingly wealthy celebrities can better show their support for the Live Below The Line campaign by making substantial donations of their extreme wealth to organizations that can distribute the resources to those living in extreme poverty. Just please stop trying to impress us by making a personal "sacrifice" to live on $1.50 a day. It's offensive, and we all know the kind of privileges you really enjoy.
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