Twitter / Billy Corgan (via Slippy Jenkins)
Billy Corgan is the wisest person of our generation.
It’s just superstition that makes people who were previously critical of someone honor them in death. They are afraid the ghost is going to lay on their face in the night and smother them.
Be real. If you didn’t like them in life, you don’t like them in death.
Humans can be cold and callous and extremely shortsighted. Often we’re only capable of seeing the big picture when we’re emotionally crushed in some way. We only allow ourselves to to truly feel when our souls are pierced.
The saying goes, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone,” but that’s not quite it. Our shortsightedness leads us to focus on specifics. Our humanness inevitably leads us to focus on the negative. But when our souls are pierced, we reset. We reset and we put all the pieces together, good and bad. We reassess. And we realize that almost all people are more good than they are bad. And with MJ, most realized that his music was present for two or three decades of happy moments in their lives.
Jackson’s death is a big loss. And after a few days I’ve come to understand why many are reacting the way they’re reacting. In what has become a very fractured world, they are reveling in one last chance to celebrate a man who brought the whole planet together in a way that only Elvis and The Beatles had done before him.
I had lost sight of that. But as I’ve heard his music blaring out of every store, bar and automobile over the last few days, I couldn’t help but be reminded.
