Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett are dead. So what?

I hesitate to even mention this non-event, however, as it is apparently front-page news, following up on yesterday's blog, I thought I might vent on the stupidity of those who see this as something worth having any feelings about at all.

Two entertainers died. Two people who, by all accounts, were completely self-obsessed, one of which who was an accused child-molester, and somehow their death is treated as some world event.

I'm thinking in Somalia, in Darfur, no one cares.

I'm thinking in Manitoba aboriginal communities, where people are dying over the swine flu, no one cares.

So why do the rest of us?

Think about that.

Are our lives so plastic, so devoid of "real" concerns, that the passing of two celebrities merits that much public interest? How many people will despair over the death of these two societal misfits who they never met, but wouldn't cross the street to give condolences upon the passing of a good neighbor?

This is the new western culture. Where real people don't matter, where we are "fed" our "friends" on television, and where we ask the government to please look after our children, so we can make more money to by more stuff we don't need. Where we discourage and in fact look down our noses at the real people in our communities who work hard and succeed, and then demand that they give us more of what they acquired through their sacrifice.

I read a fascinating book last month, called "Generation Kill", written by an imbedded Rolling Stone reporter who travelled with the First Recon Unit of the Marines entering Iraq at the start of the war, and one of the soldiers, looking at the poverty and the hardship endured by many, many Iraqis they encountered, pointed out that in America, there is so much excess that event the poor people are fat.

Perhaps it would be a great thing for this recession to continue for a decade or so.