I wasn't going to say it but I can't help myself. Michael Jackson. Why is it so impossible for so many people to not recognize that first he was human, second he was famous and as someone else described "the greatest and slowest train wreck in human history."
When people say things like, Good, he's dead. I hope he committed suicide, somehow I feel like they've just told me almost everything I need to know about them. I can't imagine saying that about anyone who happens to be famous and there are a few people who would be excellent contenders if I was so inclined. But Michael Jackson wouldn't have been one of them in my mind.
When someone has such a vehement reaction all I hear is a more generalized lack of compassion. If they think that about Michael Jackson, imagine what they think of people they don't like who they actualy know.
There's this overriding tendency towards condemnation of behaviour they don't understand. I expect they are not typically someone who would ever understand the phrase... walk a mile in someone else's mocassins. It's the vehemence, condemnation of someone they've never even met in person that really feels like an assault to me somehow when it gets spit with vehemence and disgust out of their holier than thou lips.
I think you can tell a lot about someone by the way they react to the death of someone famous. The fact that apparently some fans have committed suicide in the world as a reaction to his death is just as twisted as those people who "hate" through their judgement of him.
I never thought that I'd be "defending" Michael Jackson and the "love fest" that has erupted now that he's dead is just too unbelievable given the disdain towards him before he died, but somehow, in spite of the charges in recent years, (which by the way he was found not guilty of as far as I can tell), I truly believe he was innocent in his way of being in a way that none of us can understand and I say that with full awareness that many pedophiles believe that they are doing children a favour, loving them, showing them how to love. I'm not talking about that because I don't believe Michael Jackson fits into that category.
I don't know why I believe it. I've never met him. I was relatively indifferent to his celebrity. I saw all the TV stuff. But, somehow I can imagine based on the images I saw, and even the last documentary that this person whose life was unimaginable to every one of us, was fragile and innocent. Innocence can refer to a state of unknowing, where one's experience is lesser, in either a relative view to social peers, or by an absolute comparison to a more common normative scale. Thanks Wikipedia for that definition.
Could it be that cynicism and mistrust has annihiliated our collective innocence so completely that his way of being was incomprehensible to us.
Hitler was evil. Michael Jackson was not.