So I watched a special on Marilyn Monroe the other day. What a great way to start my first blog ever. Anyways, the special was on PBS and was told from the perspective of the photographers and the opportunities they had to capture her into film. It was a different time. Some photographers did try to exploit and use her. Others really tried to capture her; the different sides, moods, and emotions that she carried as she moved through her erratic life.
I really do hate the obsession with pop culture. It is amazing to me that people feed their kids with money they make following around individuals with a camera just hoping to catch a famous person getting angry, hurt, or in love. What business is it of ours to invade people’s privacy? A better question is why do we even care? How boring are our lives that we need to be distracted by the lives of others? Maybe we are just envious.
As I watched the impact Marilyn had on the people and the desire that they all had to know her and to be known by her, it made me contemplate on the intense value of a single person. Everyone, and I really do mean this, everyone needs to be known like this. Every life is valuable enough that people should be trying to know them, understand them, appreciate them. I just wonder how much do I really care for an individual? How much time am I spending on enjoying who that person is, appreciating their different sides, moods, and emotions?
It is the DNA of mankind to desire to know and be known. I wonder why do I not seek to know others in this fully? I wonder if I live a life that is worth being known? All these questions lead ultimately to one, who am I?
Well Quade it probably doesn't help you that some of us only seem to visit you at 4:00 on Thursday. Your point is interesting though because somewhere along the way society gave celebrities this "extra worth" and deemed it not only special for people to be known by celebrities, but important for people just to know of celebrities. Suddenly a small portion of human worth comes from your ability to be knowledgable of pop culture, to know who and what is going on in a world that is deemed "significant". I mean think about the school yard and the reaction a child might get for not knowing who a certain musician or actor was, a brand name, or tv show. Even as youth we are imprinted with the idea that to know this information and even to know unique information about these things is important. Something can only have the worth you give it so maybe the first step is recognizing the value we ourselves give to this market by continuing to serve it.
ReplyDeleteIn reference to your actual point though that people are so eager to connect with distant celebrities and yet fail to connect with their neighbors or even themselves, I think maybe they are all the same thing. People desire to be known and know others, but not at the expense of being hurt. Technology and the media have given us so many outlets to be known by not only distant strangers, but even our peers now that we can simulate deeper relationships without ever risking our emotions. We can look at someone's myspace or read about a celebrity online and have a sense of knowing that person deeper and yet without actual human face-to-face interaction we never have to put ourselves out there to be rejected. I think people have gotten so afraid of confrontation and rejection that they have opted out of really living. What is scariest though is that then the question really does become "who am I?". Not to knock what you are saying, but I think that college students are getting so wrapped up in finding out who they are apart from the rest of the world, separating themselves to "find themselves" that is becoming harmful to society and the Body of Christ. You have talked a lot about our corporate identity and I think that not enough credit is given to the fact that as much as we should have our own unique qualities, our identity is made up of a collective set of imprinted experiences and groups that have shaped us into who we are. We are we and that is okay. Spending too much time on the question of "who am I?" can easily create a very self-absorbed college student. Tony Campolo said in one of his talks that he gets college kids all the time coming in saying they can't do this or that because they need time to find themselves and after a while he decided that maybe at the end of all these kids journeys they will find they are only an onion. Peeling off layer after layer of the identity they have taken on as they developed through life only to find that their whole identity was the sum of those layers. I don't know I thought it was pretty interesting. I hope I didn't derail and lose your point, just thought I would share what I had been learning about this topic too.