People Are Terrible: Blame Hollywood

Why do we worship celebrities again?

Photo by Michèle Eckert on Unsplash.

Of the revelations of the past two years- and there have been some- one of the most eye-popping for many people has been the true nature of humanity.

Some people are really quite terrible.

This wasn’t a surprise to everyone; any social worker or ER nurse could have told you so. Forget wearing masks or vaccinating themselves: That’s a lot to expect from people who still drive drunk, abuse their children, commit armed robbery. People lie, cheat, steal, defraud the elderly, die of drug overdoses.

They kill people. And no matter what you’ve seen on tv about stranger killings, murderers most often kill only the people closest to them.

Even people who aren’t criminals do other things that don’t make sense, like pay $65,000 to hunt a giraffe. Clerks at department stores sometimes complain of customers relieving themselves in the dressing rooms. If that isn’t illegal, it should be.

It is (mostly) the rise of social media coupled with COVID-19 which has revealed this home truth to so many who before were blissfully unaware of humanity’s less harmonious aspects- that is, the existence of people who seem to be an equal and opposite reaction, an anathema, to themselves.