Rock With You

It's only just hitting me that Michael Jackson won't be around to amaze us anymore. Yeah, yeah, I know all about the weirdness but...he was at his heart...a giver. A Virgo. Someone who cared deeply about the condition of the world and who cried out in that high pitched hiccup of a voice that we were killing ourselves and that it had to stop. Sort of like what he was doing to himself.

I started reading some homages to him in The Root and clicked through to videos of him dancing and was suddenly yanked back into my youth, remembering the jaw-dropping amazement I felt watching him gyrate and spin, stomping both feet at the end of a rhythmic riff, like a period to end a wonderful sentence. He'd just send anyone watching into a can't-stop-'til-you-get-enough place. Preternatural, really. Like no one before nor will there be again.

But his gift was more than entertainment. That's just a place he went where he could be safe, where he knew his talent was unassailable. His gift was caring about what shape the human condition was in and making us pay attention. His What About Us? paints the bleakest of pictures, the planet a sorry mess, and even under the anger and pointing out, there is still hope and...caring.

And this is what makes me saddest of all that he has passed because it's getting so hard to find anyone who really cares about things. There is a dominant ethos now of "So What?" or worse, "Whatever...." I see me and what I am about slipping away, an anachronism because I still feel really bad that the Legislature can't pass a budget, that power has become so corrupting, that people who should have a voice don't and the ones doing all the shouting care only about their narrow self-interests. This isn't naivete. It's the reminder that people who care, pay a price. And even with all his wealth and material self-indulgence, Michael Jackson never had to shop for his soul.