The contrast of the Taylor Swift era - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

What a strange country we live in. On the same day that television featured many stories on the rush to throw money around pursuing Taylor Swift, I listened on the radio as a woman described how hard it was to get food to feed her children.

 

The madness surrounding Taylor Swift’s six concerts over two weeks in Toronto - roughly 300,000 tickets - has been extreme. I heard that one set of tickets being offered for resale was set at $13,000 each. People travelled to the city from across Canada, the U.S. and even Europe to attend, swarming hotels and restaurants. Some came early, in some cases for days, to be on hand so they could buy Taylor Swift-associated merchandise. I saw one woman who had bought $600 worth of clothing.

 

Meanwhile, the city had to pick up the cost of closing streets and increasing public transit. Hundreds of extra police had to be on duty to protect the hordes. And the city got no revenue.

 

Indeed, the extra money made it even more difficult for the city to pay for homeless people living in tents as winter nears. One columnist suggested that one in 10 Toronto families depend on food banks for food to feed their children.

 

This isn’t the first time fans have gone nuts over an appearance of international superstars. Just over 60 years ago, on Sept. 7, 1964, the Beatles performed two concerts at Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens, and roughly 30,000 fans suffered from Beatlemania.

 

Everything is bigger these days, both good and bad. There were 12 times as many fans lined up for Swift as for the Beatles, partly because we have more people with more money. At the same time, I don’t remember many people living on the street back then, and I was going to school in Toronto soon after that.

 

We had homes for people with psychiatric problems back then, so they weren’t left to crowd the streets. It seemed a punishment to keep these people locked away, so we closed hospitals like the one south of Goderich.

 

Meanwhile, the period of drug use that began in the late Beatles era hasn’t digressed, to the point where drug addicts live on the street because they ingested or injected so many expensive drugs they couldn’t afford rent.

 

And of course there are those who simply can’t afford today’s exorbitant rents and so they are left to live in their car or in tents.
For whatever reason, this is our modern world: people who can splurge with hundreds or thousands of dollars on a singing star, while, at the same time, we have thousands living on the street. At the same time, even the people living on the street are lucky. They don’t have to worry about being shot at or bombed in Gaza or Ukraine. There aren’t gangs threatening their lives as there are in too many countries in Africa.

 

Given all that, perhaps it’s understandable that people celebrate the music and sound and light show of a Taylor Swift concert.  The sheer joy involved makes it possible to drown out the news we hear every other day about homeless people.
And to give Swift credit, she has helped fund various good causes with a portion of the money she has earned. Still, we have the extremes of the billionaire that she is - dating a mere millionaire athlete in Travis Kelce, star pass receiver for the Kansas City Chiefs.

 

Still, there is something wrong in our society that part of the population can spend hundreds or thousands to see a concert, but thousands can’t afford their rent. Sometimes it seems as if we’ve regressed to the early years of Charles Dickens, when people were sentenced to prison for not being able to pay their debts, while others lived in palatial mansions. The difference is a simple shift in numbers where a far larger part of the population today lives in comfort and a smaller part lives in poverty.

 

Right now the people with the money seem to be tired of thinking about those without. In both Canada and the U.S., people seem to have grown tired of governments worried about helping the poor and want to concentrate on the people who want to splurge on the likes of Taylor Swift paraphernalia.

 

I understand that sometimes we want to just forget the unpleasant things there are in the world and concentrate on the joyous. Still, we find the contrasts of Dickensian days disgusting. Do we really want people in future generations to look upon our era in the same way?

 

We must elect governments that can find ways to efficiently and thoughtfully help the poor improve their lives, by humanely curing their addictions, treating their mental illness and just by finding ways for the poor to find apartments or houses they can afford to rent.

 

There’s one thing to appreciate about the Taylor Swift phenomenon: the sheer joy involved in a time of so much heartache.