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Michael Jackson is dead and millions of people who never knew him are in mourning. The grief being experienced around the world is genuine, honest and real, and it deserves respect. The anger others feel towards him is also understandable, but whether his music or personal notoriety will be his lasting legacy is a question that will not be resolved in angry chats on message boards.
Grief is a shape shifter. It can encompass responses in us that seem perfectly acceptable -- tears, sadness, a need to speak of our loss or share our memories. When loved ones die, even if they were loved only from afar, and even if that love mostly took the form of admiration or appreciation, their deaths can also leave us with emotions we might not expect, such as relief or anger. Anger is a healthy, normal part of the grieving process, but the anger that many people felt towards Michael Jackson in life has only been amplified with his passing. On message boards and forums across the internet, people who are still posting Michael Jackson's songs, videos and interviews and sharing their fond and tearful memories are being told to "get over it," or that he was a bad person who is getting a send-off better than he deserved, or both. Or worse.
We are human, therefore we grieve. When we lose those we love or things we love, life stops for a time. So many of the people we love, even from a distance, embody contradictory ideals. Every one of us has our own conflicting natures. There are things we like about ourselves, things we wish were different and often determine to change, and sometimes do. But the very human contradictions we see in ourselves are only magnified in those who achieve great fame. It blinds us to our own faults, making it easy to revere and revile celebrities at the same time. Our minds may wrestle with the dilemma of which facets of their personalities to remember, but most of our hearts do not contain such a filter.
A famous person dies unexpectedly. We might have read his books, seen her movies, bought his albums, shaken her hand on a rope line. We wonder why we feel their loss, why it should matter to us. We look for ways to come to grips with our loss, or to understand why we feel the pain that we do. Sometimes the depth of our pain is unexpected. Grief is bewildering. It can leave us feeling embarrassed or guilty. The process of coming out on the other side of pain is called healing. It requires that we feel these things and that we shed tears.
"I hate a picture that was perfect," Charlie Chaplin once said. "It would seem machine made. I want the human touch, so that you love the picture for its imperfections." We remember first Chaplin, then Elvis, Marilyn and Diana and now Michael, selfishly -- for what they gave to us, not for what they were incapable of giving to or finding for themselves.
Michael Jackson loved Charlie Chaplin, a man whose celebrity was once equally as great as his: both could be identified the world over merely through their silhouettes. He almost certainly identified with Chaplin's screen persona, the Little Tramp, which Chaplin himself described in part as "a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure." While their power to entertain and enchant crossed all societal and geographic boundaries, both men were branded moral lepers at various points in their careers. Both faced boycotts, public outcry, public trials and witnessed the sad spectacle of a once adoring audience turning its collective back.
Not surprisingly, Chaplin's political enemies were even more vociferous than his moral detractors. Although he lived in America for over 40 years, he never became a U.S. citizen. Branded a Communist, a charge he was never permitted to formally deny, he was forbidden to re-enter his adoptive home country of America for over 20 years. He emerged from self-imposed exile to accept an Honorary Academy Award in 1972, and his public rehabilitation was begun in earnest. Chaplin was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975 at the age of 85, forty-four years after his name had first been proposed and then rejected, and would be again in 1956, each time on political grounds. His redemption was complete. Chaplin once said that his "only enemy was time," but in the more than thirty years since his death it has proved to be among his best friends. Would that Michael Jackson had been granted that same chance in his lifetime.
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