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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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Its uplifiting but shouldn't we value these things as a society and fund it accordingly? I hear we are a rich nation. Instead we depend on the charity of some rich guy who wanted to take care of his own daughter.
By "we", do you mean the US? (I'm guessing based on the dad here living in a US state.)
My impression is that US billionaires and large corporations are rich, but most US residents and social benefit programs are not.
That all depends on what you classify as rich.
Certainly: median income isn't amazingly rich, around here half of households have an income of $75,000 per year, or less. Not a lot when houses cost $300,000 and up.
The social benefits programs are very blurry- people who pay a lot in to social security take a lot out - if you were never fortunate enough to have a high paying job, you don't get much.
Large corporations, by definition, flow a lot of money - some enrich their shareholders more than others.
All told, the real problem with the US is that income inequality has been going in the wrong direction (greater) for decades.
No public water parks please. Let's get good universal healthcare, universal basic income, better education and job security for special needs folks. Then they can decide if they want to spend their money on a water park, or maybe skydiving for those who hate water, or a trip to Spain. You know, actual functioning capitalism. The safety net should be set to thrive, not survive.
This charitable water park actually fits right into this vision. I have no problem with it.
A rich country with poverty enforced on its people, the wealthy is only for a small select few. Which is why you don't have healthcare and worker rights and everyone can afford to have a house, food and family. The presence of a rich guy that can spend this amount of a theme park says it all about the inequality in our societies, while other people starve to death he is making fun rides. Its a failure of many successive elections, the electorate is at fault.
Most people do value these things, they just don't have the political power to enact them.
The people who do have that level of power see it as a move that wouldn't help them, and would hinder their political goals in other areas (they don't have an infinite budget, and they have people to pay or whom they owe favours).
...and those who have this sort of money to burn, only got that money by being tight fisted and ruthless, so lost the mental agility and empathy to do this sort of thing.
But yes, the majority of poor, tired, politically disempowered people do support this sort of thing... Then a swath of them think "but I could never go to such a place, too many wheelchairs and gross children" and another group thinks "Don't we have better things to spend money on,? Local parks, drunk driving issues, business relief"... So it becomes a question of a whole hierarchy of values.
Different values win under different political, cultural, and structural systems, with different inputs, and most of the time "supporting the values" doesn't necessarily mean supporting the pragmatics - let alone adopting the role of someone actually driving and pushing every day to get this sort of project funded, supported, known about, popularised, paid for, and then built, run, and maintained.
So is that you? OR - do you - like most people - "value" these sorts of things on an esoteric, personal level... But you're mired in other states of being still.
There's meaning, then there's meaningful. We all mean well, but few of us are capable of meaningful actions on this scale.
So the question either needs this sort of understanding automatically (so everyone knows the pragmatics), or to be turned on the person asking? Don't you? Where's your meaningful action?
It's probably down here with the rest of us, which is what makes it uplifting when one person manages to have the skills and opportunities to put themselves in a position where they can step up, and they actually do something.
Its the Bushy "Thousand Points of Light" bullshit. Sure, there are a thousand points of light, in a country of three hundred million with five percent with serious needs of some kind or another.
I get what you're saying, but it's an amusement park. It's a nice thing, but it's not exactly the first thing I'd spend tax income on.
I was thinking more along the lines of "oh hey you're building a water park, cool! By law it must be handicap accessible so please make a section easily accessible and here is a $1mil grant to make that possible, show us your plans before we issue the permit". This feels fairy reasonable.