Michael Jackson, Profit In Death

Posted on June 26, 2009 by venagozar

One reader of my blog asked if I was going to blog on Michael Jackson’s death. I replied I would not be blogging about Michael Jackson’s death, but I may blog on what I think is disturbing about Michael Jackson’s life and death. What follows are my views and my opinions of emotional manipulation and the uncaring quest for extra pennies in the coffers of the greedy.

Michael Jackson, I am guessing did not make much money over the last decade of his life. Now that Michael Jackson has passed on, Michael’s death is a money magnet for some. Radio stations, broadcasting networks, independent media stations, bars, the internet (ad nauseam, now myself included), and t-shirt printers, along with assorted bobble and trinket makers have cranked up to make as much money as they can from Michael Jackson’s untimely death.

thoughts I find it is disturbing, to turn on the radio to hear, “This is hit song number xx of the late Michael Jackson’s musical career”, or something similar. Likewise to turn on the television to watch the ten o’clock news and see (and hear) the end of what for some was an emotion filled, tear producing hour. A carefully planned special on the life of a person who a few hours before was all but forgotten by most of us. Now, Michael Jackson is a golden child, potentially grossing millions in manipulated emotion driven profit.

What a great person Michael Jackson is now that he has passed on. Michael is now possibly the nearest and dearest human being we have known in our lifetime. Profit out of death. Soon if not already, there may be items changing hands for money, purported to be used by or on Michael Jackson during the last minutes in this life.

Is this what we want, greed garnished with the tinsel of remembrance and reflection; cashing in on a man’s life who for the most part, tried to keep his private life private? It would be a noble thing for all of us not to buy into this over glossed greed machine. We should balk at others using someone’s death solely to improve their bottom line.

Soon, emotion wringing will slow down. The hype machine may re-crank the tempo with baggage and trash, squeezing a few more coins from the collective emotional purse. Later, attentions will turn to making long term profits.

I choose to remember this about Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson had his run in the sun, and the last years of his life were not what anyone would willingly choose for their end. Michael Jackson I imagine, tried to live the best life the best way he knew how to live. Michael Jackson did the best he could with the tools he was given, no one can do more.

In my opinion – considering what little I understand about Michael Jackson’s life, some people in Michael’s life could have done a better job of helping him. Helping Michael Jackson become the human being he publicly appeared to wish to become.

If my pondering holds any merit, I reckon the adult Michael Jackson really tried to be a worthwhile human being first, and an entertainer second. I find the idea of someone warping another’s attempt to live a healthy, happy, spiritually productive life, a travesty and tragedy.

Writing this, I feel I am taking a cheap shot, trying to ride ride the media blitz. It does not feel good deep down inside. It feels rather chintzy. I equate it emotionally to living in a garbage dump slum, picking through rotten, slimy, rancid filth looking for something of value.

If there is any value of my thoughts in this post, it is the idea of unabashed greed driven manipulation and exploitation, wrenching as much profit from Michael Jackson’s passing as possible before he fades to another big event. I find it distasteful being an unwilling part of it.

These are my current thoughts Michael Jackson and his passing. It is healthy and wonderful to embrace and celebrate the achievements of another at the time of their passing. Generating anything else from the passing of another, only with the bottom line in mind, is in my way of thinking, less than desirable. I believe we collectively are not so desperate for coin we willingly promote greed in death. Memorabilia has its place in death of course, but greed has none, please choose wisely.

How To Feel Better About Your Community And Yourself

Posted on June 19, 2009 by venagozar

feel good I was out walking last evening, and thought up another use for my rule of three. Perhaps it will change the world too, or at least your little slice of it. As I mentioned before, I enjoy doing things by three.

The number three is important or valued in some areas, a powerful number. The Christian bible being a good example. When there was a battle, and the good guys won, the army is a number divisible by three. On the other hand the defeated is usually a number divisible by four. The Trinity is another good example, the Stations of the Cross, and I imagine the list goes on and on. Three is thought to be a powerful number. I happen to like using three because it feels like a little more than one or two, but not as hard to remember as four or more.

I thought late last night, why restrict doing something good to just where I walk. Why not bring that thought or act into the rest of my life? I went through a number of ideas, and came up with this one. It will take some time to get it moving, but I think people will catch on and help because it makes our world a cleaner prettier place to be.

As I walked to the park yesterday, I slowed down where some tumbleweed was growing in the rocks next to the sidewalk. As few cars approached I saw my opportunity. I bent over and pulled some tumbleweed out and placed it on the curbside of the street.

Once on the walking path, I picked up some paper trash as two people were walking towards me. For my third act, I again pulled some tumbleweed and set it to the curb as a car drove by and a walker was walking towards me. I used three timed opportunities to attempt to influence neighbors and fellow walkers. If I do this every time I am out over the summer, say sixty times over the next months, I am providing almost two hundred people the opportunity to be influenced into doing something good for themselves and their community.

That is great for the few blocks to the park and the walking path, but what about the rest of my day. That is when I decided it was time to turn it into three. Three times during my day, I am going to look for opportunities to do something positive and helpful, in an effort to influence other people to do the same. I think it is a great grass roots movement in the making!

Doing something good in front of other people is modeling a behavior we all should be doing, but for various reasons do not. Some of us have become shy about standing out in a crowd and doing anything that makes them stand out and be noticed. Being noticed for role modeling a good action is a great thing.

I think it is time to end those behaviors and do something good for all of us at the same time. The rule of three can be a guideline, but by no means a stopping point if opportunities present themselves. For example today, I told a worker at a local salad bar, that I hope their boss notices how hard they work, and what a good job they do. I commented on a pretty blouse a woman was wearing who looked up as she ate, looking tired from carrying life’s burdens.

Please join in by looking for three opportunities every day to model a positive behavior in front of others or by doing something for someone else. Pick up a piece of paper on the ground, pull a weed from a city flower bed, offer to help someone with something simple, like carrying their books as you both walk home. I do not think it has to be anything big to start making a big difference.

It may feel awkward at first, but the feelings of happiness and contentment that follow later on make up for any feelings of standing out. Plus picking up a few pieces of trash and throwing them away where they belong will make your neighborhood a more pleasant place. And you will feel good about what you are doing!

Feeling Lost Because You Are

Posted on April 3, 2009 by venagozar

Everything is fine and life is good and then it happens. Waking up one morning, the middle of the night, or at the most unexpected moment, it happens. Without any apparent reason we feel like crying. Not just a few sniffles, but a body shaking, alligator tear crying that wants to go on without end.

After some time, you start to notice that even though you are being racked by sobs of anguish, and your pillow is soaked. You really have no idea what it is you are crying about. Everything seems to be going well, and there is nothing wrong.

fuzzy Our parents suddenly look older and tired. Our brothers and sisters are growing up, or have grown up. Our friends are growing away from us. We feel ourselves on the outside looking in at the life we used to know. Overwhelmed by this feeling we want to curl up into a ball and cease to exist. Or perhaps retreat into the safety of the world as we knew it before we jumped on the carnival of life and were swept away.

Up until this moment, we have been living life as it comes at us. Our world has changed and we missed it happening around us. Suddenly we now see how everything has changed while we weren’t paying attention.

While it feels at this moment of being a piece of driftwood in the middle of a lake, no shore in sight, and our anchor rope is not long enough to reach the bottom and stop our drift, nothing is further from the truth.

I think what happens is we are so busy with our life up until this very moment that we have not given any thought to our life. Suddenly it seeps though our subconscious that we have been very busy, yet our life has no direction. We don’t even know the process of how we arrived at where we are.

What happens next is your future, and to some extent your past. While we may want to climb into bed and pull the blankets over our head and take comfort in the warmth and darkness, now is the time to wake up and take action.

While it feels terrible at the moment, it is time to start thinking about where we want our life to go. What do we want our future to be, and what are we going to do to help make it happen. It should obvious at this moment if we need to think about we feel so listless and lost, to what our our destiny is.

Destiny is waiting for you. Destiny has given you a whack on your head, and it hurts. Destiny is calling you too look at your life path and make the changes you need to make to become who you are to be. At this moment as you feel so empty, it is because you are. It is time to start living the life you are meant to live.

It is time to understand that you are unique, and you have a destiny waiting to be fulfilled. Take this moment when everything is hazy, and begin to forge your future. Once you determine what your real life can be, your view of the world and your place in it, will become clear again and focused.

Let the word destiny roll off your tongue until you see what you are meant to be and do. Start to feel your destiny and your life direction. Start making plans to live the life you were born for instead of floating aimlessly and feeling lost.

Celebrate the hero you are

Posted on January 26, 2009 by venagozar

Everyone knows stories of epic struggles. Whether the story of Jason and the Argonauts, Giglamesh, the recently revived 300, stories from your own childhood. For some it may be from video game heroe’s, perhaps Doom or Quake, EverQuest, or WOW. Everyone knows at least one story of an epic struggle. For some it may be a family member who served in the military, and has shared something either they participated in, or an epic story from the branch of service they belonged to.

These are great stories and role models for us to use in our own life. It is always a good choice when life gets hard to think of an epic tale and apply it to our own life. At times though it is hard to make the connection between a mythic hero and ourselves. The jump is pretty great.

A mythic hero struggles against monsters, adversity presented by oceans, mountains, deserts, and dungeons. We on the other hand struggle against the more mundane and boring side of life, broken cars, sudden expenses, family emergencies, or lost jobs.

It is hard to bridge the gap between doing battle with a cyclops and wondering where the money is going to some from to by diapers for our baby. How can we compare an act of heroism against our own life when we have just lost our job? I have never read of a hero that was just told they no longer have a job.

I believe they are out there though. I know they exist. I will even go so far to mention that you know at least one hero who has overcome adversity, loss of a job, family emergencies, or other struggle. On who overcame and conquered whatever lay in their path.

Maybe you are the person I am thinking about? Have you ever considered yourself in a struggle of epic proportions? Maybe you are a student struggling for grades, a homemaker trying to make ends meet with very little, a parent struggling to connect with a teenager. Possibly you are suddenly single, prospects for the near future are bleak, and you wonder how you are going to survive.

While tales of epic struggles rise on mist from the past, or live in the imagination of a game developer, or take place on a battlefield far away and out of sight, there are huge struggles going on all around us that we do not even realize. Everyone knows someone who went through a tremendous struggle of some type and came out victorious. Yet when asked how things were in the midst of the battle of their life, more often than not the person involved in the struggle answers, ‘everything is fine, and you?’

There are the every day struggles that do not garner the spotlight that the rest of us go through as we go through the journey of our lives. We all struggle at some point in our lives against something we feel we are unlikely to defeat, yet somehow we do. We get through college, we find ways to provide for our families, we manage to overcome various afflictions that befall us in our lifetime.

Take a moment or two and reflect on you life and the silent struggles of epic proportions that you survived. Celebrate those victories because they are every bit as grand as any story ever told. Steel yourself in your stories of victory, knowing that you overcame a situation as bad or worse than anything you are now facing or may face in the future.

Reflect on the magic that is in you, the strength you found to not only survive your past or present struggles, learning to thrive because of them. When you have celebrated the hero in you, look at those around you, and know that they too fought their own struggles, scared and silent at the thought they may lose. Know they too fought on and they found victory, and it made them better and stronger. Celebrate the hero in each of us!

Making ends meet when times are tough

Posted on October 19, 2008 by venagozar

I once mentored an elementary school boy named Pete. Pete came from a very poor family. His father had left the family, and his Mother had no skills to earn anything more than minimum wage. I was watching a news channel this morning on the state of the economy. There was a woman being interviewed who had not worked for a year. Her prospects of finding a job are not looking good. She is running out of money and hope.

There is a classic book, The Grapes of Wrath. It is the saga of a family during the mid west dust bowl, and the great depression in the first third of the last century. The family lost almost everything due to the misfortune They traveled to California from camp to camp looking for field work. They were beaten down and plagued by bad luck throughout most of the book.

Another classic book along the same genre is, The Good Earth. The Good Earth is a story of a successful Chinese family whose fortune and fame take a terrible downturn. While the Grapes of Wrath took place over a few years, The Good earth was about decades of family struggle. The characters in both books are so downtrodden and beaten to the ground, one would think they should just lie down and die.

Lying down and dying from misfortune may work in the world of theatrics; in the real world life is not so generous. Being born is hard, so is dying. Between those two states there is no choice except to keep on living. Even if living is a daily struggle, there is no other option. Which brings me back to Pete and what he was doing post Halloween some years ago.

Pete, like almost any other kid went out and got his share of Halloween candy. This is where the likeness between Pete and other kids ended. Pete suddenly had some money when I met with him one week. Not a lot, maybe thirty-five cents. For Pete, that was more money than he had seen in several months. Curious, I asked Pete where he was getting money from.

Pete told me his Halloween candy was the source of his income. He had hidden his candy away for a few weeks, until most of the kids were out of candy. He took his stash out and started selling it to the other kids for anywhere from a penny to a nickel for each piece of candy. With that money Pete was buying more candy and little packets of lime flavored salt and reselling them for a few cents more than he paid. Pete soon planned to start selling juice drinks and perhaps candy bars if his customers could afford them.

I knew then that whether I was there or not, Pete was going to be alright in his life. One way or another Pete was going to be successful and find a way to beat the cycle of being poor. Pete has ‘Gumption’ as an old movie I can not even remember the name of talked about. Gumption made Pete a go getter and a small business man at the ripe old age of eight. I wish everyone whose life is falling apart could have met Pete. One or two hours with Pete, and they would see what a little ambition and creativity with a shot of gumption can do for someone.

Active listening and active thinking – final

Posted on September 27, 2008 by venagozar

Everything in life from the mattress we sleep on, to the shoes we wear is a result of manipulation. Music and dance have a huge impact on what we think.We would like to think we are above being influenced, and our ego tells each of us we are our own person and unique, but when it comes to the influence peddlers it is not always true.

It is important for you to carefully examine what you think and why. Your individual identity and the choices you make in your life should be your thoughts and not external manipulation. The point is not to become a rebel learning new ideas for the first time, but to be aware of meanings behind everyday interaction.

If it were not true and we were above being influenced, and having our opinions changed, we could go anywhere in the world, and live like the locals. The fact is we can not. Travel shows filmed in exotic locations, partake in obscure foods, and television in the genre of F. Factor prove this is not possible for us.

In your own life, where are your Doc Marten boots? What was your favorite cereal as a young child, what is it now? What music did you used to listen to? How has your world view changed?

I covered a lot more than I thought I would, and yet I barely scratched the surface of active listening and active thinking. There are many resources on the web if you want to learn more. The local library and book stores also have wealth of information that may be of value to you.

Many of these changes are external to us, but we internalize them. Think about the hair style of any adult woman in your family who is over thirty? When is the last time they changed their hair style? How many variations have you gone through over the last five years alone?

Being influenced and influencing others is a part of our nature. Knowing you are being influenced is important in keeping your life going in a direction you choose.

Other posts of possible interest to you are:

Thinking and making good decisions, pass it on!

Belief and a child’s thinking turned adult

Welcome, Ven a gozar!

Helping People Grow, Linux, Flavor of the day

Category Archives: Character