And the distractions continue

As if I needed more evidence of what I wrote in my last column; the last few days have been a “you can’t make this stuff up” type of week.

First up we have one Jussie Smollett, the Empire actor who said he was jumped, beaten, had a noose planted around his neck and doused with bleach in Chicago. His agent claimed he heard the assailants shout, “This is MAGA country.” Now we are being told that Smollett faked the whole thing, though the story is still developing. Next we have one R. Kelly, the R&B extraordinaire who made women swoon. It seems that some of those women were very young and he took full advantage of them. These allegations had been spoken about for years, but it wasn’t until a televised documentary with interviews from victims that anything finally came of it. Now Mr. Kelly finds himself at the wrong end of the law facing 10 counts of sexual abuse charges.

Next we have one Robert Kraft, he the owner of the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots. Seems Bob decided to partake in sexual hijinks with a couple of young ladies in exchange for cash and was caught on camera. Shame on Bob.

Now these three fellows have one in common: celebrity. And as I said in my last column we are obsessed with celebrities — what they do, what their wearing, who they sleep with, etc. And the Media knows this so we get wall-to-wall coverage of it all. The crimes these three men have committed have been done before, but because their famous, it’s shocking and we must gossip about it. Remember Harvey Weinstein? He wasn’t the first man of power to use it to abuse women, but because he was a Hollywood mover and shaker it meant more than some creepy CEO sexually harassing and abusing his female co-workers who simply wanted a raise or a promotion.

But while the Media has everyone salivating over these stories an even more frightening one happened right around the same time as a Coast Guard officer in Maryland was arrested for stockpiling weapons and planing a domestic terror attack of epic proportions. There wasn’t a lot of news coverage on this. Well there was some but not on the scale of the above mentioned cases. Our fascination with celebrities keeps our eye off the big picture. We are distracted and always get caught like a deer caught in headlights. And until we can pull ourselves away from the gossip column it will continue.