Adding my two cents to the MJ mania

The fervor with which Michael Jackson's death has received is undeniable. The media's coverage is constant, and people can't stop talking about how though they may have made fun of him when he was alive, they always respected his music. I've always found the case of Michael Jackson interesting on a deeper level. When he changed his skin color over the years, from black to white to whiter, most people (most, but not all) viewed this as just one more personality quirk, one more sign of his mental illness and eccentricity. I always viewed it differently. He certainly had a self-abasing streak, and accusations of pedophilia do cast a cloud of suspicion over his image. However, I blame our society for this man's downfall into madness. Though I am the last person to erase the personal responsibility of the individual, in this case it seems startling clear to me that it is a racist society which brought him down this path of madness. The man felt that white was better, so much better in fact that going through painful, crazy surgery was a reasonable idea to him. No, I don't buy the idea that this was some sort of 'artistic statement.' That lets us, our society, off the hook. The fact is, Michael Jackson felt so god-awful in his own original skin, that he had to take matters into his own hands. Has any prominent white man or woman in our society ever tried to become black? I don't think so. It seems that Michael Jackson's last recording, "They Don't Care About Us," is also his redemption. The song is good, so good in fact it gave me chills the first time I listened to it. Jackson has become the outspoken, wild and unlikely champion of the black people living in Africa. The gist of the song is that the West (as a whole) does not care about these people. The colonization of Africa, and our meddling in African political affairs over the years to assist our own greed proves that point. I believe this last song of his was his redemption. He reclaimed his forgotten skin color, his forgotten history, and made a ballad that will inspire some and sicken others in its truth: