Wait til you hear this
Y’all, we broke Aaron Parnas this week and I am shooketh.
That sweet, enthusiastic cub reporter whose dedication has carried him through sleepless nights, new fatherhood and countless daily horrors retired his signature opening line of “we have breaking news” because,in his words, the news is already broken.
And then he signed up for a marathon.
I am deeply worried about this young man, even though I don’t know him personally.
Burnout comes for us all, and it’s been stalking him for a long time now.
And he’s not the only one. Creators are dropping all around us.
That’s the trouble with having the type of career where you have to make yourself available all the time, you’re on a 100 mph hamster wheel and if you try to stop or slow down it just tosses you around like a rag doll.
And the audience isn’t very kind about it.
We’re all guilty of it to some extent, I suppose. We forget that those people on our screens who educate and entertain us are people with faults and frailties who need our kindness when things get rough.
The world is so hard right now. So many of us are struggling. Why can’t we have a little grace for those who dare to do so publicly?
“Well, they chose this” is a crap excuse. You chose your job, too. Does that mean that you also deserve to be miserable?
Most of these people didn’t even set out to try to be social media stars. They just wanted to talk about something that’s important to them or a cause they believe in. A lot of them just want to try and make the world a better place.
And we can’t seem to just let them.
We’ve known since the days Marilynn and Judy Garland that fame tends to be cruel, but why have we never questioned it? Why are we so willing to accept it as a matter of fact when it doesn’t necessarily have to be? Why do we punish the creative souls who are brave enough to share themselves with us when they’re the ones that bring us joy and laughter? Why are we ripping apart the people trying to make things better while we turn a blind eye to greed, hate, exploitation and cruelty?
And why are we busy making stupid jokes about Madonna’s lyrics while pretending we didn’t see the way she called out the inherent racism in the criminal justice system?
Shitting in someone else’s garden won’t make your own grow any faster.
Stop pointing fingers.
Start planting seeds.
Image by Matejin, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons