It's NOT Tragic

I don't want to seem cold-hearted or calloused, but Michael Jackson has been dead less than 24-hours and I've had enough already. When I first heard the news yesterday it was on the radio as I was driving home from a meeting. It was nice to hear about it, but the DJ went on for about 3 minutes (which is a long time on radio) babbling endlessly about how just didn't know what to say. Then don't say anything!

It might surprise us to learn that according to the "CIA Factbook" over 6,700 people die each day. Why do we not stop and think about the fact when we invest hours of our days, weeks, and lives into "mourning" the death of a famous person that we don't really know.

I admit, it is sad. But it is sad when anyone dies. But why do we think that the death of Michael Jackson (or Farah Fawcett or Ed McMahon for that matter) is any more newsworthy than any other death? Did I know any of these people? NO. I may have known of them, but I didn't know them. Never met them. Never even saw them in person. Why should their death cause me to want to immortalize them forever?

I should probably point out that my rant here is not in particular against Michael Jackson or the media, but against our society that seems to have valued celebrity over real relationship. Every time a celebrity dies we get this media frenzy and people who flock to create memorial shrines to these people we never even knew.

Misuse of the word tragic. I could probably rant for days and weeks (and likely someone has a blog somewhere to this point) about the misuse of the English language. But if one more media person uses the word "tragic" to describe Michael Jackson's death, I'm going to scream! Sad, yes. Surprising, yes. Unexpected, yes. Heartbreaking, I'll give you that one. Unfortunate, yes. BUT NOT TRAGIC. I believe that "tragic" is a word that should be reserved for events of great magnitude. Major accidents, natural disasters, calamitous situations (as one dictionary defines it), events that massively alter events going forward. Michael Jackson's death, though sad, heartbreaking, and surprising was NOT tragic! As a matter of fact, death has your number and my number and will get us all in the end whether we like it or not. Death is inevitable!

What is tragic gets back to the others of the 6,700 people who died yesterday. Some of those people were surrounded by loved ones, others died suddenly and unexpectedly, others died after a long battle with disease, still others died alone with no one around. Tragically the loss of those people to the world goes largely unnoticed. Yes, their friends and their families generally notice (I say generally because for a few of these people they do not have these ties, which is the greatest tragedy of all) but they don't get their picture on the front page of the newspaper, they don't even get an article in the front section. If they are lucky a newspaper will provide space for them in the obituary section, but only if a family member writes something to be included.

Maybe I'm just bitter because I'm not a celebrity, but somehow I don't think that is it. I think it comes down to this worship of celebrity that seems to envelope our society. Were it not for photographs we wouldn't have a clue who these people are (See Shane Hipps "Flickering Pixels" for an elaborate explanation of that statement) and yet we pretend that these people had a personal relationship with us and that their death somehow impacts how we live our everyday life. I've gotta be honest, when I woke up this morning, the fact that Michael Jackson is dead didn't make me do anything differently though the death of Millie still hung in my mind.

Who's Millie you ask? Millie was one of the members of my congregation who passed away on Sunday at the age of 93. Millie is one of the 6,700 who didn't get her picture on the front page of the paper, but is missed by many friends and family.