What Matters To Us

I've been thinking about this for a while now. It seems it's so much easier to mourn Michael Jackson, than Neda, who became a martyr for freedom and democracy, in Iran. I don't believe that the majority of people are now willing to die for their beliefs, actually I feel many people don't stop long enough to think about what really matters - just as long as they are comfortable is good enough for them. They have forgotten or never lived through real adversity. I find it a sad reflection of our society, when people get too comfortable they forget what really matters and those beliefs like liberty and freedom are worth sacrificing one's life.

When I think of the funerals of Diana, Jade Goody or Wacko, I get depressed. Yes, the displays of grief, the keening and moaning over artificial shrines with scented candles, the fake religiosity were, to some extent, whipped up by the media.

But what if these sugary, sentimental, morally empty displays of collective hysteria really do represent the modern soul? Two or three generations have passed in the West who, compared to their historical predecessors, have suffered no real hardship - no wars, no food shortages, no tyrannies.

As we sat in front of the telly or plugged into our iPods, guzzling cheap food and listening to cheap music, did we become bloated on the cheapness and the ease?

Is Goody-mania or Jackomania the moral equivalent of obesity, the result of bingeing on fake satisfactions and tawdry dreams? Is freakish, sentimental Wacko a representative of our collective psyche?

And will all the blubbing, sugary, silly responses to his pathetically predictable death be an expression of what we in the West have come to?