A great example of this is the events surrounding Michael Jackson's death. Michael Jackson died June 25th, 2009 at the age of 50. Once news of his rush to the hospital and his critical condition broke, people started losing their minds. I was one of the first people at my workplace that found out about it (there's a small group of us who try to keep up on the news during downtime a twork). Once I mentioned it to one of my co-workers (people overheard me), I suddenly had 5 different people at my cubicle looking over my shoulder at the screen desperate for updates. Someone that hadn't thought or cared about 10 minutes earlier suddenly became the most important thing in their lives at that moment. People were on their cell phones calling relatives. And my workplace was just a small sample of what began happening across not just America, but the entire world (stats on Internet usage spikes once news broke).
Michael Jackson's funeral was later announced. It would be held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009. People would be able to register for a lottery to receive two of the 17,000 free tickets that would be given away. The winners would be given wristbands and unique ID's that would prevent ticket scalping. 1.6 million people registered, roughly the entire population of the Phoenix metropolitan area (1.3 million at the time of the 2000 Census).
In order to further accomodate this worldwide event, the Jackson family would provide live video feeds to go out on the Internet and across various TV stations so that anyone in the world could watch. In the US, the funeral was carried on 18 channels. According to the Nielsen ratings, it was watched by more than 31 million people and earned a 20.6 share. This was for an event held in the middle of a workday (Link). To put that in perspective, the 6 major TV networks that night (CBS, NBC, ABC, Univision, FOX, and Telemundo) averaged 29.2 million viewers that night TOTAL (Link). So, with people home from work and watching TV at home that night, the funeral, which was held during the day on a work day, had nearly 2 million more viewers on TV.
The online feeds are even more telling. The funeral was carried on pretty much every major video streaming site. The Jackson funeral was, for the most part, the second-most watched event on the Internet of all time (first place was Obama's inauguration). MSNBC reports that they had more than 19 million video streams that day (not all of them were live during the funeral), a new record for them. CNN had 9.7 million live video streams. Facebook, which had an integration with CNN.com for that day, reports an average of 6,000 status updates per minute from people taking part. Ustream reports nearly 4.6 million viewers. ABC News reports nearly 6 million through it's various sites (Yahoo, Verizon, ABC, etc). MTV reports that, since his death, views on Jackson's music videos, documentaries, and interviews are up 10,193% from the week before (yes, that's PERCENT, not total numbers). For even MORE statistics about all this, I highly recommend visiting this site which sums up the information from each source (some of the same information is in the NY Times article linked above).
Is it wrong to mourn the loss of someone? Of course not. The Bible specifically tells us TO do it (Ecclesiastes 3:4, Romans 12:15). The problem is the extent to which people have taken this. Within the first week of his death, more than a dozen people in Australia had committed suicide directly citing Michael Jackson's as the reason, with over 50 people calling suicide hotlines on the brink (Link). Those are obviously the most extreme examples, but are very telling. The videos of people weeping in the streets and laying flowers on makeshift memorials across the world showed us exactly what it looks like to mourn like you have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). And all of this was over someone that the vast majority of people had never met in their lives.
As Christians, whenever someone dies, the first question to enter our minds should be where that person will spend Eternity (the second question is what we could have done to make sure that person spent Eternity in Heaven). I have never personally heard a testimony of faith from Michael Jackson, but that doesn't mean that he never accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior. However, that was not the focus most people took when they mourned his death. Instead, we focused on the great loss to this world and to ourselves (nevermind the fact that Michael Jackson hadn't been culturally relevant except as a punchline for over 10 years). Most people had lost their idol.
I really do hope that Michael Jackson was saved and is now in Heaven, but his death really shouldn't mean any more to me than any other death. I have never met him nor anyone in his family. All I know about him really is that he could sing and dance. Is that enough to make him someone to look up to? Unfortunately, according to American Pop Culture, yes it is, and that's pretty sad.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment