On three cultural icons from three different decades
I'm sure at some point in time I will post about my really tough week, the missions week (which don't happen to coincide with the really tough week), and life in general right now.

However, I wanted to point out that many in this nation are reeling from the passing of three different cultural icons within the past week.  First, Ed McMahon; second, Farrah Fawcett; and third, Michael Jackson.

This is probably one of the first times that I've been swept up in the chaos that is a celebrity passing.  Over the past couple of years, many celebrities have died, primarily ones that I watched in old movies.  I didn't feel very much about it - after all, they were a bit older when they passed away, and I had little if no emotional connection with them, unlike my parents, who grew up watching their movies.  There were also the more recent deaths of Steve Irwin, Heath Ledger, and River Phoenix (okay, so that was a long time ago), who shocked us because they were so immediate and so young.

However, the three that passed away this week seemed to really mark something for people.  I asked myself this afternoon about why these particular celebrity passings were so shocking to people of my generation, and came up with the following conclusion: our childhood is dying.  As a kid, I remember Johnny Carson on the Tonight show.  I remember singing Michael Jackson songs with the rest of the second graders in my school.  I remember my Dad watching Charlie's Angels and the Dukes of Hazzard reruns.  And now these three icons have passed in a week, a sure sign that I Am Growing Old.  Those who were in their prime when I was a child are now passing away - some early, some not so early - and that more and more of the cultural icons that we looked up to in our youth are now crossing that final bridge into the Great Divide.

As a nation obsessed with celebrity culture and staying young, we are fascinated by those in the spotlight, by their foibles and failures, by their successes and the shine of the red carpet.  We get to know them, get to know their lives and their deep secrets, blown up by the media so that we think we know them.  And hence we feel that we relate to them, and when these strangers pass away, we feel a sense of loss - not for them personally, per se, but for the simpler times we lived in as we were growing up.