It's been a busy news day in North America. No, gas prices haven't jumped another $0.20, and no, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has not been leaked on the internet. What HAS happened is that Paris Hilton has been put back in jail.
In case you haven't been touching base with gossip circles lately, Paris was thrown in jail last week for violation of probation. It seems as though she didn't understand that she had had her license suspended several months earlier for reckless driving, mostly because her publicist didn't explain it using appropriate vocabulary that had been "Paris-ed down" to a 4th grade level.
After spending a good five days in the slammer, some dinkus going by the title of Los Angeles County Sheriff decided to release her to serve her time under house arrest for the remainder of her sentence. House arrest in the Hilton home. That's gotta be like locking a 10 year old in Toys R Us. There's so much to play with, everything OUTSIDE the building seems like a prison.
When I first heard that she was being thrown into the "big house" (by this I mean jail, not the Hilton mansion), I was surprised by how happy I was. After all, why should it matter to me, a man who rarely follows celebrity gossip or reads the tabloids, whether or not Paris was going to be doing "hard time"? I don't know her personally, and my life will not be altered in any way if she goes free or spends a month-and-a-half swinging a pick axe, or whatever they do in jails these days.
However, when I heard about this "serving time at home" crap, I found myself once again caring. Caring to the point that I actually took time out of my day to search up news stories on the internet to find out why she was skipping out of the cell block. And similarly, when I found out later today that she's being chucked BACK behind bars, I smiled a little on the inside, and felt like life just got one health-point better.
But all of this still raises the question of why I care. Like I said, she has no personal connection to me, and my life will not be altered in any way by her fate.
I think that when it comes down to it, it has something to do with revenge. I think that all of us non-celebrities somehow feel like the rich, pretty, unearned-fame crowd has cheated us out of a slice of life that we feel we were more entitled to a piece of, and so when they go down in flames, not only do we watch them burn for our own entertainment – we want throw a few logs into the fire just to make sure it's nice and hot. After all, we've been burned ourselves (without a big enough bank account to bail us out) and a part of us feels nice knowing that for once, money can't make up for stupidity.
Of course, many people think that it's a matter of fairness that Paris be put back in jail. I can see where they're coming from. But if fairness were really that much of an issue in our society, I can assure you that we'd be living in a much better world. UNfairness happens all around us every day, in ways that actually affect our lives, but we don't get rankled about it. It's unfair that an engineer who comes to Canada from Bosnia has to get a job as a janitor because his certification isn't valid in North America. But I'm not checking out immigration laws on the internet. I'm concerned about Paris.
So that leaves us with revenge. Revenge against the people who are rich and beautiful. Because they don't deserve money or beauty. Because they never earned it. And because most of us weren't born rich or beautiful ourselves.
You'll have to excuse me – it's time to check my lottery ticket.
Just a quick post to share this hilarious comic that Larissa found as she was digging through some old teaching assignments tonight. It's about Christmas and was created by one of her Korean students back in 2001. Personally, I think it's an excellent attempt to try to capture the complexities of the theology behind the incarnation. Click on the thumbnail of the comic on the right to read it in full-size. 