No matter who you are or where you live or how old you may be, you have an opinion on Michael Jackson.  Even if your opinion is that I don’t really have an opinion, you know of him and have come up with a conclusion.  I’ve never thought of myself as a huge Michael Jackson fan, but I do know that as the media has played his many many many hits over the last week, his voice brings back a trillion happy memories for me. 

I was in high school when Thriller came out.  OMG!   Who doesn’t remember singing along to PYT with your Farrah Fawcett hair?  Listening to his music could bring me to tears and make me laugh hysterically at the same time.  Here are my realizations:

1.  How did so much time pass by and I still look the same…haven’t aged a bit?

2.  Where are all those friends that sang along with me in our cars, using our hands as microphones as we belted out one song after another?

3.  This is the most important one - how could an entire country be forever changed by one man, yet force him to live in isolation and then ridicule him for being strange?

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His death really makes me think.  It makes me sad for us as a whole.  Maybe living in LA makes me somewhat tainted because I do see what celebrities go through.  As my family drove out to Neverland Ranch over the holiday weekend, it made me realize what a spectator sport being a celebrity has become.  Neverland Ranch is truly in the middle of nowhere.  You wouldn’t have even known it was there if you wouldn’t have googled it. 

As we drove and drove and drove, we passed a mom and pop grocery mart.  The kind of store that you never see in Los Angeles.  My husband asked if I thought Michael Jackson went there.  Are you kidding?  This poor man wasn’t allowed in the grocery store.  It would be too much work.  Can you imagine being Michael Jackson and walking through the store? 

Recently I saw video footage of Mickey Mouse in his hotel room entertaining his children.  While some may view this as a luxury, I think of it as sad.  He was stripped of his freedom.  But what blows my mind is that after we stripped him of every right that we enjoy, we then decided to ridicule him.  In a sense, he was bullied and society was the bullier!

So, while we pulled up to the media frenzy that was parked outside Neverland, I was sickened even more to find t-shirt vendors trying to make a buck off Michael’s death.  It wasn’t LA’s finest moment.  It’s all a little surreal.  Instead of being in awe of Neverland, I felt like it was his prison.  There were gates in front of gates.  You couldn’t even see the second set of gates from the street.  It was sad.  It’s sad that we lost an amazing artist, but even more sad to me is how we forced him to live his life.

What I’ve learned from all this is to be more gentle with people and not be so quick to make assumptions.  No matter who you are, you deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.  You deserve the same basic rights as everyone else.  And when you give yourself to the world, you deserve to be celebrated!