One Million the New Opening A-List Ante for Texas Flood Relief

Kevin Hart’s $25K Houston flood relief challenge was ballyhooed as the Ice Bucket Challenge but with some real cash oomph. You have to wonder if celebrities really wanted to be tagged. It’s a lot of pressure when you’re social media lit up and peer pressured into writing a check for twenty-five grand. Maybe you’re not as liquid as people think. Blow doesn’t grow on trees. Not in North America.

And as soon as you comb the couch for what was to be your Lambo downpayment, Tyler Perry, Leonardo DiCaprio, Beyonce, Sandra Bullock and other Hollywood gross revenue point participants throw down a million. It’s the new ante. Just like that. Donald Trump offered into the pot. As did Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. It’s like watching the drunk parents at a super elite private school fundraiser. If you’ve never been. Somebody’s walking home with The AIDS quilt knitted by Mr. Thompson’s third grade class for an obscene amount of money.

Highly publicized disasters are precisely the time to work the expansive celebrity egos over for even more expansive checks. The Hollywood money will ultimately pale in comparison to the hundreds of billions the Feds will be redistributing in tax dollars over the coming months and years, though Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Gates haven’t checked in yet. They could personally rebuild Houston in the manner of an enormous Silicon Valley open floor plan office space with yoga rooms and Chai tea dispensers. In the very least, toss in a billion and watch DiCaprio’s dick shrink. Sucker.

There’s nothing like a good televised disaster to open up the private pocket books of people who live for attention. One constant about performers, you turn on the spotlight and they will dance. It could be worse. They could bitch about raising the public till and not give themselves. Or what occurs normally in between highly publicized floods of the century.

Those people Kevin Hart shamed into giving $25K have to be feeling pretty pissy right about now. Your fifteen minutes turned into a second and a half. Maybe you wait a bit and see if anybody truly remembers. That new Lambo is so you.

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