Last night I had myself a date, or more of an outing with a friend from the past.  This is a girl I met over a year ago, and we hadn’t seen one another for a while so we arranged to get together to hang out a bit. Nothing dastardly, go watch a movie, have some drinks, and basically just kill some time together.

Where the plot thickens my friends is that this girl is a serious Christian.  For those of you that know me well, or have been following this blog I know you’re already laughing and looking forward to the rest of this story. God bless you.

Michael Jackson and Pope John Paul

For those in the cheap seats, this is funny because I am a very secular guy. I don’t say there isn’t a God, I basically don’t discuss it. I  just find its a moot point. As for religion, I’m not a fan.  So the fact that this girl and I are friends at all is rather remarkable in its own right, especially since its like she comes to hang out with me just to argue and make snide christ-y comments as if at any moment I’ll break down into tears about how she’s saved me and I’ve seen the light.  I find it kind of funny.  Like when it comes up that I am not drinking for 30 days, she says (all quotes in this article are as accurate as possible yet not verbatim of course), “Is it because you’ve never given up anything for lent so you feel the need to make up for it now?”

This is where I quite correctly respond, “Or maybe I’m just able to make my own decisions instead of taking orders from the church. Besides, I do give up something for lent every year: church.”

Its this back and forth that is quite possibly why I also enjoy hanging out with her. For the sake of this post, and because at one point last night I called her Sister Mary Agnes, let’s call my friend “Mary”.

Mary and I had some time to kill before the movie so we jumped into a restaurant to have a few drinks.  Her with a vodka something and myself with a huge barrel sized mug of soda water and lime.  I guess at restaurants if you don’t drink they want to make it known to everyone around you. Thanks Kelseys.

We start our conversation on the benign and it leads into Michael Jackson, not sure how. It might be because it was on the news, or someone was talking about it, or more possibly, because its all I have spoken about since I heard he died. So as we begin, I mention a few of the songs that I like and how I think Michael Jackson is the last great musical icon I believe we’ll ever see in our lifetime. I continue to stating its too bad in the past ten years he’s been dragged through the mud by the media.

At this point, I’m not even sure I was even speaking to her or just speaking out loud to affirm my love of Michael to the world(this must be my grieving process).  Then its at this point that the conversation takes a turn for the worst.

“I don’t know how anyone could ever possibly idolize a person like Michael Jackson after what he did to those children” and she said a person as if we had just been discussing Ted Bundy or Osama Bin Laden.

At this point I thankfully thought, WWMJD, and decided against pouring my drink on her and I would instead listen to her point on the matter.

Mary’s position was that Michael Jackson erased all of the good will with his music and charity throughout the world because of what he did to those children.  In her mind Michael’s guilt of child molestation was as sure to her as god sitting on a cloud answering everyone’s prayers.  She cited this view because of two factors; Michael had the children sleep in the same bed as him when they stayed over, and because Michael decided to settle the matter out of court.  This was the basis of her entire argument.

My side of the story, is that there was an extensive and inconclusive investigation in which Michael was violated through a strip search and both the ONE boy who claimed molestation/sexual abuse and his father  were questioned.   The child’s father Evan Chandler was at one point quoted as saying, “If I go through with this, I win big-time. There’s no way I lose. I will get everything I want and they will be destroyed forever…Michael’s career will be over”.  Hardly the statement of a concerned parent.

Yet still, all of this is beside the point.   There are many reasons why settling out of court was MJ’s best course of action, but at best there is a 50/50 chance that he was guilty.  And though it was very difficult for me, I did concede that yes, it is possible that Michael was guilty. Personally, I don’t think so, but again, that’s just my opinion.

My final point to Mary was that even if Michael was indeed very guilty of molesting this one child, I still don’t think it comes close to undoing all of the joy, hope, and goodwill he inspired throughout the world.  And all the good he could have done was cut short and pulled down because of one greedy bastard father (who got $200 million by the way), and a blood thirsty media and society more interested in tearing down their idols than getting to the actual truth.

Now at this point, out of nowhere, Mary decided to somehow start comparing Michael Jackson to Jesus.  Seriously. This blew my mind in a “WTF?!?!” sort of way. But once we got back on track, Mary finished off her argument saying that no matter what Michael Jackson had done throughout his career or no matter his own broken life, the fact that he (allegedly) abused this child (“children” to her) he is an evil evil person and she just cannot forgive him.

You really gotta love the black and white opinions of some of these religious people. Never any gray area.  Birth control? Bad. Gays? Evil.  Abortion? Murder! I guess it does make life easier when you don’t have to think critically about anything outside your own argument. I admit, I’m envious.

However, within Mary’s absolute condemning of the evil supposed child molesting Michael Jackson, there was one massive, and equally hilarious flaw in her logic which I was more than happy to point out to her.

I smiled at this realization, and took a nice long sip from my barrel of water before beginning.

I started, “Mary, so you’re saying, that no matter how much good will Michael Jackson has done for the world, just because he, in your eyes, molested these ‘children’, he is evil and it is impossible to look at him as anything but a monster? Its unforgivable?”  I gleefully awaited her obvious response.

“Exactly” she said.

“The only thing that I am now having trouble with, is how you can condemn and shame a man forever who was never proven to be guilty, but you can stand by an organization like the Catholic Church who have, through active choice and deceit, definitely and quite smugly molested and sexually abused young boys for the past century?  Not only is it an absolute hard fact that the priests throughout the Catholic Church have ruined the childhood of THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of children but they have actively covered it up and protected these vile, disgusting men, effectively allowing them to continue.  Michael Jackson allegedly molested one child. The Catholic Church has definitely ruined the lives of thousands of children, and that’s just Ireland”

Here is an article from May 20th about the awful and disgusting report out of Ireland detailing the atrocities the Catholic Church put their students through. Click  HERE to read about it.

In all honesty, I’m not crystal clear on what Mary said after that.  but she somehow missed my entire point regarding her irony of her unconditional love for the catholic church, and then proceeded to claim that since I thought Michael Jackson was still an amazing icon and worthy of idolizing I was in favour of child abuse.

It was like my entire mention of the connection between the catholic church, child abuse and her idolizing of the Pope and catholicism never happened. It was truly amazing.  Now that my friends, along with the fact that Mary and I, managed to watch a movie and still have a nice evening after that discussing was indeed a miracle.

As for Michael Jackson, may he rest in peace, and may the spirit of his music, his memory, and his message of love, acceptance and understanding, continue to inspire all of us.

Goodbye Michael.

Thank you.

We had a policy at our school that the social rep. acted as a DJ every Friday in the cafeteria for the common lunch hour, playing host to nearly 1500 students. Even from my freshman year of I loved this concept. It was a brilliant way to get the students excited for the weekend and in a good mood.  The only problem is that the year prior to my senior year we had elected a social rep. who was an unwavering heavy metal fan. Each Friday I would have to walk into the cafeteria and listen to sixty-five minutes of the hardest, darkest, angriest music on the planet.  Not to mention that these sets would, without fail, include Marilyn Manson’s The Beautiful People at least twice.

Everyone has the right to listen to whatever music they prefer and I don’t believe death/heavy metal breeds bad people by any means, but when you’re voted into your position and 75% of your audience consistently leaves the area, its time to rethink your playlist.

I spent the entire year pleading with this guy to play some different music. I would bring him CDs from home and ask him to play just one song, denied.  I wasn’t asking for him to change the tilt of his entire set, just merely throw a couple bones to those of us that wanted anything else. I nearly begged this guy, Please, stop giving me a motive and a soundtrack with which to murder you.

It was near the end of that year that I realized that its those that take office, no matter if they’re geniuses or mentally retarded, that make the rules.  There seems to be no bigger requirement for political office than a grandiose ambition and the need to impose your will on the unwilling and the apathetic.  There are times we have leaders with integrity, intelligence, and the goal of nothing more than to work logically towards the greater good, but for the most part, we usually end up with the offspring of two first cousins.

With this epiphany I realized my problem, was next year someone else would be spinning the turn tables, and from what I was gathering it was a girl with musical tastes running a polar opposite to my own.  All I could think of was if  I got stuck in this scenario for another year, my final year, there would in fact be blood (likely oozing from my ears).  So out of desperation, I ran for office.  I shook hands, I kissed babies, and I made promises, everything a good politician would do.  Even my terrifying fear of public speaking was dwarfed by my fear of Marilyn Manson (the music, not the artist).  I took the podium, delivered with purpose, and won the popular vote. Yah me.

This was a far cry from the kid in grade 9 who spent the majority of his day discussing his “future potential” with the principle.  I felt triumphant.  On the final Friday before summer break our DJ had to hand over his speakers and microphone to me and I would lead the students into summer.  I remember playing summertime songs, up-tempo hip hop and dance tracks, the cafeteria was alive again.  People were dancing, hell I was dancing, and we celebrated a new era of Friday lunch breaks. As ridiculous as this might sound, this was the first time I started believing one person could make a difference.

Throughout the next year I stayed with my new choices of music, buying new CDs almost every week (on my own dime, when all I had were dimes), and tried to make as many people as I could happy.  My core set was hiphop, pop, and dance but I often threw in Offspring, Green Day, and a sprinkling of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. I truly tried my best to not be the gestapo of the year before but I quickly learned you can’t make everyone happy.  Though the vast majority of students were happy with the change in DJ, there were a couple groups I went mano-a-mano with for the entire year. These people were my GOP.

In the beginning they would come to me furious with my selection, and I would apologize that they didn’t like approve, play a few songs to their liking, and hope this would help. But I soon realized each time I played one of their death metal songs, the rest of the cafeteria suffered for my appeasement.  Groups of people would exodus the area, and often stayed out of ear shot and not to return until next week. Even with this appeasement my GOP would only come back demanding more. I began to think, “Why am I doing this?”

In my effort to not be the tyrant from the previous year, I had turned myself into a people pleasing monkey.  I decided this had to stop. I had to realize that being a tyrant and being a push over were equally dangerous.  My GOP took no interest in the concessions I was trying to make, they were just concerned with getting their way.  I wasn’t telling them not to play their music on their stereos, at home, or even in the hallways outside the cafeteria, but inside the cafeteria I was doing my part to make sure everyone was having a good time. Why couldn’t they see their music was making everyone else miserable on Friday? When all I wanted to do was give people a chance to hang out and party together. When I tried to compromise, somehow, it still wasn’t good enough.  In their eyes their quest to still be seen as important and relevant came to supersede those needs of the majority, their fellow classmates.

I am not by any stretch of my inflated ego or gregarious imagination comparing myself to Obama, but I do see similarities in this parallel.  I’ve seen Obama take office with the rejoicing of his support base from not only his country but the entire world… am I the only one that gets how big of a deal that is. The WORLD begged American to change, pleaded with its citizens to stop playing that same song over and over and over again, as they couldn’t stand the sound.

Now with Obama’s current struggle to get anything passed in congress without a “Republican response”, and then days and weeks of banter causing nothing but confusion and dissension in the American people, its time Mr. President and the Democrats finally took a stand. Its time to tell not just the GOP, but everyone, that they have patiently listened to the broken record of tax cut solutions, and free market gospel and now its time for the sore losers to sit down, listen, and for one minute consider the fact that there just might be another way.  If your President, for argument’s sake, tries to start a war under false pretense, maybe then its time to halt congress, wave the flag of party wars, or take your opposition to the American people on the national stage. However, when you have a world economy heading further and further into a total economic sink hole based largely on regulations you passed (or didn’t pass), maybe its time you guys sat this one out.

This definition of insanity has been attributed to both Ben Franklin and Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If this is true, I think the inside of the House and Senate should be fit with rubber walls. Where things stand now I don’t even know what’s worse, the sore loser party that can never accept failure and defeat, or the party with the backbone of a jellyfish.

In recent days it has been gratifying to see Obama stand up to roll out the promises he made during his two year campaign. I still have hope, that YES HE CAN take a stand for the people that voted him into office; but I have an almost definite feeling that even though the broken record has been removed from his cafeteria, we’ll still hear it blasting from the hallways for the next four years… or until we’re all deaf.