RIP MJ?

Listening: Eet by Regina Spektor

Yes. We are all saddened by the death of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. But honestly?? It's all I've heard about all day. The fact that people are "schocked and saddened", well.. it shocks and saddens me a little. Someone dies every second.. lots of those people are kids dying from terrible sanitary conditions, or hunger, or war. Why don't we focus on those deaths? How come that isn't something we post on our Facebooks and Twitters and Blogs at every oppurtunity? Because it happens so often? Because they're so distant it doesn't matter to us? Or because they never had a chance in the first place? Maybe because they can't sing Thriller, or they're not a Charlie's Angel. AUGH I'm so fed up with people's obsessions with celebrities' lives. Even flipping through channels the other day with my friend, Jon from the reality show "Jon and Kate Plus 8" was saying something along the lines of "We have men from our country dying overseas all the time, and all people care about is what I'm eating for lunch??". Even someone the centre of the tabloid's attention doesn't understand it. Just imagine... if people took the money they spent on gossip magazine's alone.. that's 3 or 4 bucks a week.. and put it towards anything, AIDS, homelessness, the SPCA, War Child... can you imagine what an impact that would make? If 100,000 people buy something like US Weekly, that's around $350,000n a week. Can you imagine? If everyone replaced reading Perez Hilton with reading up on women's rights under Taliban, or child soldiers in Africa, so much more would be accomplished, and we would be so much more knowledgable about the world around us. I feel as if this generation was raised to praise everything above us and ignore everything below us. Then again, how does that differ from the norms of the past 100 years?