Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton.
There: I just had to get everyone's attention. And now that I have, here's an announcement I hope many of you will welcome: I'm not really going to talk about Paris Hilton. Well, not much, anyway — just long enough to talk about why we need to find something else (almost anything else) to talk about.
The only thing worth exploring about the Paris press orgy is why she's such a big deal. You can say that she's just the ultimate manifestation of our vapid, celebrity-obsessed culture — that she's just (in the words of about a zillion pundits) "famous for being famous." But as an explanation for her getting this much attention, that's a bit shallow.
It's true enough that Miss Hilton hasn't made any, shall we say, noteworthy contributions to society so far. In fact, she hasn't made any impact on society at all, for good or ill. Other celebrity girls-gone-wild — Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan — have made an impact: Millions of girls have wanted to be like them. (Though not so much any more.) No one ever wanted to be like Paris. Everyone knows her, but no one ever looked up to her. Just the opposite.
And that's the real reason people talk about Paris Hilton, I think — beyond the usual money/fame/beauty reasons. They can look down on her. They see her as a spoiled ultra-rich kid who takes plenty and gives back nothing, who makes messes and expects other people to clean them up, who breaks the rules the rest of us are supposed to live by and imagines she's entitled to do it.
Someone like Paris Hilton is easy to look down on. All too easy.
One of the devil's favorite tricks is to make us dwell too much on someone else's vices. We can be most vulnerable to him when we feel most virtuous, and that's easiest to do when we disapprove of real character flaws but spot them mainly in others, not ourselves. Celebrities who act outrageous fit well into his strategy. We can go on and on about them without ever feeling like grim, censorious judges: Deriding and mocking them just makes us feel like hip cultural observers.
It should go without saying that a great many celebrities have richly earned the public's disapproval, and they should get it. But we just shouldn't spend much time talking about what's wrong with them — certainly not as much as many of us have spent lately on Paris. We can start enjoying it too quickly. And since it's a lot more enjoyable than thinking about our own vices (how mean or manipulative I was to my girlfriend the other day, how nasty and short-tempered I was to that driver who annoyed me today), it's bound to draw us away from repentance and toward judgmentalism.
And that's not the only problem. Spending much time focusing on celebrities is a counterfeit way of paying attention to events in the world. There are all sorts of stories worth our attention — all sorts of events, both good and bad, that effect vast numbers of people — but hardly anyone is talking about them because they're busy going with Paris or Britney or Lindsey, on the latest antics of Tom Cruise or Rosie O'Donnell.
So let's take a break from all of them for a change. Let's find something else to do: Let's toss out ideas for news stories that really deserve to be new stories, but aren't. I won't even pretend to rank them in order of importance ("The Top 10 Neglected News Stories of 2007"): Lists like that are far too subjective to have any value. But I'll get the ball rolling with a few things that should get our attention:
Abortion is an old topic most people don't want to discuss any more. But there's no decent way to ignore it. Every year in the U.S., well over 1 million children fall victim to abortionists' poisonous chemicals and sharp-edged tools. That language isn't graphic: It's a rather tame description of an act that is always, by its nature, ugly and violent. And it's gone on legally for more than 30 years. We can argue about exactly what to do about it. We must not simply get tired of the subject, or hide behind easy dismissals like "everyone should have 'choice.'" When something so horrible happens such a vast scale, it is always more important than 99 percent of the stories that fill the news, and equal in importance to the rest.
You may have heard advocates of funding embryonic stem-cell (ESC) experiments with taxpayer dollars predict numerous medical breakthroughs. What you're less likely to have heard is that adult stem cells (ASCs) are already being used, with great success, to treat a host of conditions, including a large variety of cancers, diabetes and other autoimmune diseases, multiple sclerosis and sickle cell anemia, to name just a few. ESC backers are eager to sweep away ethical objections to their practice, which envisions breeding human beings for the purpose of killing them. So they often present a choice between supporting their research and sacrificing treatment. But the choice is a false one. Medical breakthroughs are already coming fast: Millions of us will benefit, or have already.
Iraq has gotten a lot of coverage, but some of the biggest things happening there have not. One of the biggest is the refugee problem. The United Nations estimates 2 million have fled the country in the last few years, to places like Jordan and Syria, and perhaps another 1 million have been uprooted from their homes and fled to other spots inside the country: The numbers are growing, perhaps by up to 50,000 a month. One of the least-known facts is that a huge portion of the country's Christians — despised by many Shiites and Sunnis alike — are among the refugees. Whatever one thinks of the war itself, this is indisputably a major humanitarian crisis, and it ought to be a major news story too.
Christianity is growing explosively in non-Western countries, and this is a trend that's been going on for years now. Are some of us worried that the Church is in shabby shape in the U.S. and much of Europe? We should be. But we shouldn't imagine that God's plan rises or falls based on what Westerners are doing. The rise of belief in Africa, Latin America or China may foretell a future where Christianity thrives mainly outside the lands where it's been strongest historically. Jesus may return today or thousands of years from now: We have no reason to assume God is done with His world.
As I say, that's just a starter list. You can probably think of a lot more topics to add. So talk about them — any of them. Talk about big events in the world, or talk about small events close to home (which may be just as important, if not more): your family, your friends, your job, your churchmates.
Just don't talk about Paris. And if you think about her, pray for her. She may be rich in this world, but what she really needs is to inherit the treasures of the next.
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