Privilege

Now, be honest with me: What would you be like if you were 19 years old and you were worth countless millions of dollars — more than you could ever spend in a lifetime and you employed a large staff of people to provide whatever you wanted? Would you, at 19, handle that kind of super-privileged life with maturity and personal discipline?

I probably wouldn’t.

I don’t know that I would be as out of control as Justin Bieber has become but with nobody to guide me — to tell me no or to say “stop it right now or else”– well, what would “or else” mean to me? But that kind of destructive indulgence isn’t exclusively the world of Justin Bieber or Lindsay Lohan.

Just yesterday, I was talking to Luis Gonzalez, former Diamondbacks baseball star, and as of last week, an inductee into the Latin American Sports Hall of Fame.

I asked him about the perpetually troubled Alex Rodriguez, of the New York Yankees, and his ban from baseball for using performance-enhancing drugs. Gonzalez said, sadly, that Rodriguez was catered to from his days as a high school star to now as “A-Rod,” the out-of-work millionaire with unlimited wealth and not an ounce of integrity.

Hey, Mom and Dad, repeat after me: “I love you, honey — but no!”

Try that every so often, OK?

I’m Pat McMahon.

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