Never say rich people don't have problems.

They do. The challenge is in the diagnosis. So often, the problem they think they have isn't the real problem at all.

Perspective is everything when it comes to evaluating the woes of the wealthy. Kids are good at this. Especially teenagers.

This brings me to Greenwich, Conn., and the current crisis there among some of the landed gentry.

Greenwich is a town of roughly 62,000 people; most of them are white, and nearly 60 percent of the adults are college-educated. It has pockets of not-so-privileged people, but the median value of a home is about $1.3 million; some sell for $5 million or more.

Even an overgrown lot on Riverside Lane is worth $1.25 million, which nobody seemed to care about until a group of teenagers decided to claim it as their own.

When it comes to causing trouble, these kids have some nerve. For one thing, they apparently decided not to spend the bulk of their summer dealing drugs, taking drugs or trying to buy drugs. They also aren't having a lot of unprotected sex in the bushes or spending all their time in basements playing video games and watching porn. Far as I know, none of them has even gotten into a fistfight, let alone joined a gang.

Nope, these kids really wanted to stick it to the grown-ups. So armed with free time and lots of initiative, they built themselves a Wiffle ball field. And they did it smack-dab in the middle of that vacant lot worth $1.25 million.

The Greenwich Time, which is the local paper there, reported that 10 to 15 teens spent a month clearing out dense overgrowth and building a plywood fence in the outfield to resemble Fenway Park's Green Monster. They put down bases, too. They even — get this — hung a big ol' American flag in foul territory down the left field line.

Cretins, every last one of 'em.

Before you knew it, dozens of kids were showing up to play Wiffle ball. Reports have them laughing and yelling and sometimes even whooping. There are also rumors of a repeated crack of plastic hitting plastic.

Well, there's only so much you can ask of some people — particularly some people of Greenwich. Neighbors started complaining. So noisy, they said. So unsightly. So not what our teenagers should be doing.

As a neighbor lady put it to WTNH-TV, these kids are just too darn old to be having this kind of fun.

"Most of the people I know, and I've grown a family, stop playing Wiffle ball when they're 12 years old," she said. "I mean, this is just a farce to do something else."

One neighbor hired a lawyer to shut down the field, and then residents started taking sides. Lots of talk about zoning and liability issues — and about permits and proper drainage, too. A town meeting on the Wiffle ball controversy has been called for Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the kids continue to play, and Greenwich Time's Tom Mellana weighed in with an editorial of common sense:

"Back before we lost our collective minds and began shrieking with horror at the thought of kids having fun on their own (as in not part of an official league or otherwise organized activity), they used to do things like find a vacant field, turn it into a makeshift diamond and spend glorious unsupervised hours in the summer sun.

"And sometimes they gashed themselves open on a piece of glass, and sometimes a neighbor's window got broken. And they showed up the next day stitched up, with money to pay for the window and a new rule that hitting it toward that house was an automatic out."

You can see where he was going, and most of Greenwich's residents seem to be coming to the same conclusion. Mellana said that roughly 95 percent of the response has been pro-kids.

As for the Greenwich grinches, the diagnosis is clear: They have forgotten what it means to be a kid.

Fortunately, they've got a town full of teenagers happy to remind them.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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