Kelce and Swift wedding - an option and on celebrity privacy

July 6th, while listening to rolling thunder outside! It sounds like heavily overloaded carts are rolling over a cobblestone road in the sky right now. Not much rain coming down, just noise!. My dog is under the piano. I was reading the e-mail news since we have not lost electricity here in Camden County, NJ. Something that has long bothered me, since the days of Princess Diana is the entitlement the press and fans seem to have to the privacy of performers or famous people. Fans have a right to see their favorite performers on the stage, but leave them alone in their homes, please! Why do fans and papparazi think they have the right to hound celebrities constantly throughut their lives, as though somehow they are owned by the media?

Princess Diana of course was the worst case in this situation. She was thoroughly persecuted by the papparazi and I think they should have been treated in a criminal way for hounding her. It goes without saying that a good part of the blame is the avid, even predatory invasive interest of a segment of the public that creates the financially driven predation on the lives of the famous. If people didn't avidly buy spy style magazines, even magazines like People, and if newspapers and magazines focused on the REAL news for awhile instead of pandering to gossip hunger, we would all be more educated and better.

I remember when rags like the National Enquirer were scorned and mocked. Intelligent people looked down on that monstrosity of ignorance and depravity - endless stories about women being sucked up into alien shps and probed and impregnated. I only know this because that disgusting front page used to be at eye leven on the check out aisle of the supermarket where we were trapped until we paid and bagged. Thank heavens it is gone, however the culture of it has flourished and taken the place of real news about important happenings.

Ignorance has been pandered to rather than people's interests having been elevated by education and the media, so now the standard of public information has declined into gossip and sports and repeated superficialities.

I think there should be laws protecting the privacy of people famous or not. Invasion of privacy is what it is called and how it should be criminalized just like slander and defamation. I don't know how to address the avid gossip mongering desperation of those who have nothing better to think about. I did my best as a public school teacher to open young minds and help them sample the vast and nourishing world of ideas, but now I am old and all I can do is observe the way the world is turning. I can tell you that high school was an uphill battle too - when the minds of the post industrial low socio demo culture in which I taught was captivated adn enslaved by drugs, alcohol and sex.

The ignorant have won, for awhile anyway, and their leader is in charge of the rest of us, at lease for the time being. Bad times come and they also go - all I can do now is wait - and listen to the summer thunder.

Happy Trails to you until we meet again!

wrightj34@yahoo.com