I thought it was a joke. You know, now twitter has recovered from its Thursday trauma some pranksters start spreading rumors that Paris Hilton would build a $300,000 dog house. Turns out, it's true and she has. They were wrong about the price, it was $25,000 more.
Having just returned from Haiti this story kept playing on my mind. It is not that she did it, it was that she was willing to do a photo spread for Life and Style magazine about it. Almost as if to say, "Sorry your home is getting foreclosed, but check this out!" To each to their own I guess but I realized how the lives of six dogs in Hollywood stack up against the rest of humanity. Working in design and construction for communities in need I started thinking about what we could do with the funds for Ms. Hilton's pooch palace.
This would equate to two hurricane resistant three bedroom family homes on the Gulf Coast (7-10 beneficiaries), three youth sports facilities in Kenya or Brazil (1200-1600 beneficiaries) or twenty two post cyclone schools and clinics in Myanmar (35,000-50,000 beneficiaries).
The irony is that her great-grandfather Conrad Hilton, born in a simple adobe dwelling in San Antonio, built an empire and used his last will and testament to help found the Hilton Humanitarian Prize, awarding $1.5M a year to benefit humanity. In his will he wrote "There is a natural law that obliges you and me to relieve the suffering, the distressed and the destitute."
The beauty in living in America is that everyone has the liberty and freedom to do, buy and say whatever they please. However Paris (and Faye) if you wanted to build a 300 sq ft. canine cabin we could have done it for you for $50K and you could have used the other $275K to fund a couple of schools for
Call it compassionate consumerism. Your pooches would be pampered and hundreds of lives impacted -- all at the same time.