It's amazing what a little publicity will do. How we've come to deify people just because they're well-known.

I've read Dear Abby and Ann Landers for years. Not really because I thought they had anything of merit to say, but because I'm a bit of a voyeur and these people who write in freely display their lives and their issues for all of us to read. But, to tell you the truth, I'd really begun to dislike Ann and Abby a long time ago. They were just so... smarmy. Condescending. Righteous. They were from another generation of thinking, and it showed in their advice. Yet people still took their dictates as if they were gospel, simply because they were in the paper and therefore it must be true.

We care more about the divorces and public spats that take place on the front pages of our entertainment magazines than we do about those happening around us every day. I read somewhere that a woman is murdered every 3 minutes or so in this country, yet some football-player-turned-actor kills his ex and it becomes a riveting drama that captivates the entire nation to the point where we were glued to our TVs for every second of the courtroom proceedings, and we still talk about it five years later and it's still embedded in popular culture. Children are molested daily and people protest when a sex offender moves into a residential neighborhood, yet some R&B singer records a song blaming his sexual exploits with young women on the fact that he's famous and we forgive him, turning that recording into the most-requested song on a major metropolitan radio station only 90 minutes after its first exposure.

Look around you. Life is real. It's happening here & now. It's not taking place on some TV screen or in a movie theatre, as nice an escape as those might be. Don't make your stars into idols and don't exempt them from the morals and behaviors that we mostly try to conform to. Everyone should be accountable, and everyone should be measured by the same yardstick.