Michael Jackson’s death highlighted for me how much we have lost it as humans. I’m not trying to take away the sadness or reduce the impact that his death will have on the music industry but the amount of press his death got around the world astounded me.
Speculation is not my thing but what is clear is that he was not living a healthy life. He seemed to echo the lifestyles of other brilliantly creative and tortured artists…but in this case excess was certainly a contributing factor. I’ll go out on a limb and say that his health issues, to a degree, were self-inflicted. Can you argue that when you knowingly pump drugs into yourself [state of mind arguements aside]?
The man was brilliant and there is no disputing that, especially in his early days – the times that it didn’t matter if you were black or white.
For one second though, can I take you off the emotional MJ rollercoaster and present a few stats:
A quick search on Google for Michael Jackson yielded 249,000,000 hits and a subsequent search for Hungry children 97,400,000 [and this is just looking online]! I was mortified so I tried a broader term like poverty in the search box…guess… only 53,200,000!! That little exercise just proves my point, we are a world gone mad. One person who ultimately lived a privileged life [if you buy the notion that life is what you make it and take control of your own path] and died from a potentially lethal cocktail of drugs is more interesting than the 153 million malnourished children under the age of 5, 6 million of whom die every year as a result of hunger. Is that not crazy or is it just me?
I know there are those of you that will say that you cant compare..blah blah blah, but you cannot get away from the point. Our morals are messed up and we seem to have lost the plot. We pull together as a globe when a famous person living in Neverland dies but children trying to survive in the real world are dying every day and we [ordinary people] are not speaking with the same LARGE connected voice to stop it. There is no ‘ universal outpouring of grief’ for these children, most [because they come from developing countries] will more than likely be laid to rest in an unmarked grave, their little lives overlooked by a excess driven world. How sad is that 
And no, I am not a communist in case you were wondering, I just believe in balance and giving back! And yes, I do have MJ’s CDs the guy was a legend.
Gripe over.
Afritude. My African Attitude. 