The Man In the Mirror

What is it about when someone significant dies that we all change our minds about him? I am just as much of a culprit as anyone else. I punished him and judged him, laughed and jeered at him, but now I feel significantly remorseful. Why do we as a society go back to the Salem Witch Trials every time a significant figure falls? We watch as they bleed...and relish in their demise. Why? Maybe it makes us feel better about our own lives. Now that Michael is dead I see him as more of a human than I ever did when he was alive. I remember going to the Thriller concert in the early 80's with my brother Jerry. We somehow landed the Jackson's parents tickets through a friend of my fathers and watched the amazing superstar from just a few rows away. He was astounding. His performance mesmerised us. We watched him moonwalk across the stage, and I remember the emotions I felt at the thought that I was witnessing history.
Michael Jackson was a part of history that most of us managed to witness from start to finish. He was the greatest child singer, an amazing young artist, a genius in his time, and a has been for all intents and purposes, one of the greatest entertainers of the modern age. What happened to him? I have a newly found compassion for this guy now that he is gone and frankly it troubles me. He was so misunderstood like so many of us are. Every person is misunderstood at one time or another. But for most of us it is merely an instance; some messed up period in our lives that we make a mistake and our peers relish in our demise. For Michael it was a lifetime. No one could imagine that anyone could be that naive. No one could imagine that anyone could be that childlike, and really be who he claimed to be. No one understood why he constantly was trying to change his outward appearance to be someone else.
Perhaps he stopped growing up, this Peter Pan from Neverland, the moment that he became famous. From the age of 6 years old he was different from the rest of us. His family life was abusive by all reports no doubt, but society, all of us, played a huge part in creating this boy who never loved himself for who he was. He was our puppet and he was never good enough for any of us. When he was at his peak we wanted more, when he was changing his appearance we thought he was a weirdo.
The whole pedophile thing was what really threw me. I could not imagine any grown man having little boys staying in their bedroom for any good reason. It was beyond my scope to think that this was anything less than sickening. But perhaps, if I was to understand him a bit better, taking into account that he was found innocent by our court system, I could see this too from his child like perspective. Children were the only ones he could trust. He too was a child with the social mentality of about an 8 or 9 year old. So when he invited them over he never even dreamed of the sick things that our society was conjuring up that he was doing. Then when the families of the children he was inviting realized that they were not going to get any real monetary reward from him playing with their kids, perhaps they became predators themselves.

Michael Jackson was in a lot of pain his entire life because society could never really find the right box to put him in. All of the boxes that we choose were just ideas. He was an artist with a tragic ending, like so many artists before him. Like Vincent VanGogh, Michael Jackson will live on in the hearts and minds of all people throughout the world as one of our greatest artists, misunderstood in life and cherished in death.