The Classic Tragic Figure

Michael Jackson died today and as I was looking through the comments on FB are qualified by something like, "he got weird at the end but Thriller was my favorite album back in the day." I am struck by the fact that it is that very attitude that we have towards him that caused his real death years, maybe decades ago. We loved him for what he did, how he performed and in the end what kind of scandals he was involved in. At the end it was a train wreck. Nobody ever cared about that man even when he was a boy. They all loved him for what he did, not who he was. He surrounded himself with people who used him up and filled him full of the things that he wanted to hear. The tragic death was long long ago and that makes me very sad. Moms and Dads remind your kids that they are special and not because what they do makes us proud. They are not ours, they only come through us.