•
There are a couple of stories within a story here, so please bear with me as I explain “The Box“
Elvis Serval
On Sunday, April 26, 2009, Carolina Tiger Rescue received a call from a woman stating that her friend had a pet serval she could no longer care for, and that the animal needed to be placed quickly. Staff informed her that she would need to contact the Curator of Animals, Kathryn Bertok, to make rescue arrangements.
The following morning, Kathryn discovered a full grown serval in an animal crate that someone had left at the entrance to the staff parking lot. A typed note attached to the crate gave the serval’s name, Elvis, and a few details about his history, but no contact information.
A local veterinarian examined Elvis the morning he arrived. She determined that Elvis is about two years old and undernourished. He showed evidence of a collar having grown in to his skin. He has permanent scarring, likely from continuous rubbing on a cage or crate, and his hind legs were atrophied. Taken together, these findings suggest that Elvis was kept in confined quarters.
However, when Elvis was released into a larger enclosure, he continued to walk in small circles, even though he didn’t have to anymore and was no longer confined to such a small space.
Elvis in his new enclosure but afraid to leave his crate.
Elvis peers out of his crate the morning after his arrival
Press Release about Elvis Serval: http://www.cptigers.org/news/pressreleases/2009/2009-04-27Elvis.pdf
Elvis had been cleared of common infectious viruses, and now inhabits his own large enclosure on the tour route at Carolina Tiger Rescue.
Elvis eventually reached healthy weight and regained good hind leg strength in the following months. CTR will care for Elvis for the rest of his life and you can donate to his care or to the care of the other animals at Carolina Tiger Rescue at their site: http://www.carolinatigerrescue.org/help/donate.asp
The road-rager in the white SUV
On Thursday this past week, I was driving in rush-hour traffic to get to a class at 5:30. Traffic on one of the main roads was of course bumper-to-bumper with a lot of stop and go and the usual idiots swerving last-minute in front of others and short, hot tempers. At a stoplight, entering the left turn lane and having been unable to move quickly at all prior to that due to the line of cars ahead of me, I was honked at and flipped ‘the bird‘ by some chubby redneck in a big white SUV. I had no idea what I’d done wrong or what he was so angry about. I guess he somehow expected me to just drive my little foreign car over top of all those cars in front of us so as not to cause him any inconvenience in that heavy traffic. He apparently considered it all my fault that the traffic existed at all and that I could do nothing about it to help him and helping himself feel better was of course all there was in his world at that moment.
When I got to my class, I was told by another person that she had possibly been ‘raged‘ at by this same guy herself at that intersection. He seems to have an M.O. in this area.
Kelly Williams-Bolar
You’ve probably heard about Kelly Williams-Bolar: the poor black woman in Ohio who fudged the address of her two daughters in order to send them to a better (white) school district 1-2 miles down the road. She used their grandfather’s address instead of their own to enroll the kids in school. She was inexplicably charged with a felony and also told that since she had been convicted of a felony, that she would be unable to get her teaching degree. Pretty harsh punishment considering the crime.
She stepped outside the box – outside the class and social strata she’s been born into. And frankly, I think that is more of a problem for the ‘powers that be‘ than any law she broke. I understand people pay taxes for schools in their districts and people from other districts sending their children to a school where the parent didn’t pay taxes is unfair. However, when should a parent ever be punished for wanting their children to have a decent education – even and especially a poor parent who cannot afford to live in a better school district and who wants her kids to have a better life than she did?
The way I see it, this problem really isn’t with her – a poor black parent wanting her child to have a better education. The problem is with the system. All these disparate school districts everywhere instead of one unified and excellent educational system that is available to everyone no matter where they live or pay taxes. That is the problem.
Instead of fixing the system though, we punish those refuse to or cannot live within it, or who try to show us a better way. These are the ‘Rosa Parks‘ of our society. And our society doesn’t take too well to them and never did. However, human progress has only ever been made by people like them. They are the rule breakers. Not the law breakers necessarily, but the rule breakers. Often when they break these rules, they are criminalized or made an example of, defined as an aberration, an atrocity, a criminal, and they are either severely punished for what is only a minor crime or they are punished severely for no crime at all!
But the truth is they’ve usually broken some unspoken and unwritten societal rule, more than any law. They’ve dared to step outside ‘The Box‘. The box of societal definitions and expectations, or outside their own class or social strata. Or, they’ve simply defied someone else’s definition of what they should or should not do, or where they should or should not go. They are the canaries in the coal mine. They are the harbingers that tell us: “Hey ya’ll, the system is broken“. Rather than crucifying them, we should appreciate them and learn from them. But we never do.
And it’s easier and more convenient to just kill or cage the canary than to fix the system, so that’s what our society often does instead. It does what Elvis’s previous owners did to him. They shoved him into an unsuitable box for their own convenience because it was the easier solution than dealing early on with the situation they had themselves created – which was not a wise one to begin with – owning an exotic pet like that which they could not properly care for. Unfortunately, the animal suffered for their bad human decision-making. And Ms. Williams-Bolar is suffering the same way for the same reason. She has been told that – whether she likes it or not – she and her children will stay in their place in society (poor) and will not be allowed to make their lives better, or to go further or outside the social class they were born into.
Michael
I don’t read all the things written about me, I wasn’t aware that the world thought I was so weird and bizarre. But when you grow up as I did, in front of one hundred million people since the age of five, you’re automatically different.
– Michael Jackson
Michael grew up outside any societal boxes. He simply wasn’t raised that way. From the age of around six, his life was different than any other “normal” kid’s life. But that didn’t matter, people still expected him to be and act “like everyone else“. Because in society we are ‘expected‘ to be a certain way, dress a certain way, act a certain way, stay within certain limits of behavior, and take more than we give. We are expected to be all about ourselves and not others. We are expected to be narcissistic and sociopathic and to only care for ourselves and our own, ignoring everyone else. Those ‘rules‘ aren’t written anywhere, but they exist nonetheless. You bet they do.
Michael didn’t follow those rules. He couldn’t. That’s simply not who he was. He was himself, but he was not about himself. He was unique, and different and loved a world that he could never fit or be allowed into. If he had been raised in that box and stayed in it, would he have been such an entertainment genius? Would he have been able to give the world all he had given it, dazzling our eyes and hearts with unprecedented performances and stunningly beautiful and meaningful music and films? Would he have been able to try to teach us what we still refuse to learn? Of course not.
And he dressed differently. He did things no one else would or could do. He came from a very poor family in Steel town Gary Indiana, from a small house with two bedrooms shared by two parents and nine kids, where his only other future could have been drugs and gangs or becoming a steel mill worker. But the steel mills have all but closed down now and either of these outcomes were exactly the future his parents did not want for their kids. Had Michael joined a gang and gotten into drugs or become a steel mill worker, our society would have been much nicer to him because you know that was pretty much to be expected. And as long as he only did what others expected him to do; as long as he stayed within the class and social strata he was born into; as long as he stayed within that box of definitions and expectations our society built for him – that was fine.
But Michael didn’t do that. Instead he did the same thing that Kelly Williams-Bolar in Ohio did. He stepped outside the box. He stepped so far out of that class and that social strata of society he was born into, that he went all the way to the stars. He was a star that burst out of Gary Indiana to join the rest of them in our galaxy. And he was severely punished for it.
The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael.
-James Baldwin, ‘The Price of the Ticket‘
Michael Jackson gave more than he took. He gave to people he didn’t even know. He paid for funerals of children he didn’t even know. He paid for life-saving treatments and surgeries for children he didn’t even know. Who else does that? He felt the pain of all children (not just his own, all of them) and worked for peace and worked to reduce or eliminate the pain of children all over the world. Most “other people” don’t do that. Because of this inability or refusal to live inside some box of rules and arbitrary expectations our society has for all of us, because of his innocence, sweetness and Guinness Book Record generosity, because he cared ‘too much‘ about the world and everybody in it, he was looked upon with suspicion by society, the legal system, the political system.
Yes, Michael cared ‘too much‘, and instead of the rest of the world taking a lesson from that and caring a bit more about one another using the example he set, Michael was instead defined as weird and vilified. He was demonized, criminalized, lynched, called a ‘freak‘, a ‘weirdo‘, and worst of all, a ‘pedophile‘.
Because when you want to destroy someone for stepping outside the box which has been defined for them, or for not behaving in a way someone else expects, or for being a threat to the status quo in society, the easiest way to do it is to attack them about something they love most. For Michael, that was children. This is very controlling behavior on the part of our society. I have experienced such controlling behavior in personal relationships so I recognize it when it is done on a larger scale. It is the worst form of bullying.
I want to heal the world, save our children, & they hate me for it. They want to destroy anyone righteous. . . . I’m not trying to be philosophical, but I really think it’s my job to help [children] & don’t care if people laugh.
-Michael Jackson
The world didn’t understand Michael because he wasn’t ‘like‘ them. The profitable propaganda and devious misinformation fed that misunderstanding. When health problems ensued which he had no control over, he was demonized and ridiculed for that, too. He was bullied on a scale with which we’ve seen no one else bullied in our lifetimes. He was subjected to pain piled on top of pain as a decades-long full-on assault was launched against him from inside that God-forsaken box the rest of us are rammed into and which we are forced to live within like Elvis the serval. And like that poor cat, we end up not knowing how to walk outside a space bigger than 3 feet by 3 feet – even when there is nothing stopping us and even when we had someone like Michael to show us how.
Instead we learn – lest we be punished the same way Ms. Williams-Bolar was, or the way Michael was by the likes of that road-rager in the white SUV – that we had better conform and be like everyone else or we will be made to suffer dearly. We learn to stay in our place and never think of wanting to do more, or wanting to be more, or go further or be something different than what we’re “expected” to be. Not something illegal, just something different or further or better. We’re simply taught not to want that and not to go there. Then as adults, even if we can, we still don’t do it.
Society didn’t doesn’t mind taking Michael’s creative gifts, profiting from them, enjoying them – but they collectively threw Michael Jackson the human being away like a piece of trash. If you ask, many people will tell you that’s what he was – that he we some evil abomination that needed to be destroyed. Many people spent their lives and built their careers on that destruction effort, and they’re still at it. This is a certain blindness, caused by the walls of the box. It’s also a profitable blindness that is perpetuated by the media. And a lazy and ignorant blindness consumed by the rest, unquestioningly. The crucifixion and lynching of a man who simply didn’t live inside the box in which rest of us are trapped is testimony to this blindness. Some of us can see through to the outside, and we see Michael for who he truly was. Millions of others cannot see outside though, either because they are truly blinded — or because they make too much money to even look — and their lies and lynchings are profitable business. An entire industry has been made of it.
But what about that creativity that blessed us with so many dazzling gifts from Michael? Oh we love that, of course. Nevermind it came from such a ‘weirdo‘. How many times have you heard someone say: “Oh yea Michael Jackson was a great entertainer, dancer and singer but he was really strange and I just can’t get past all that weird behavior of his.”
But it doesn’t ever occur to these box-blinded people that his creativity, genius and brilliance existed because he was different, not in spite of it?
Michael respected the wisdom of young children because their minds are yet unspoiled by such prejudice – or by greed, revenge, religious or political objectives, or by outsized egos. That kind of unassuming innocence is what drives creativity. Creativity itself is a child! Michael seemed to know instinctively what the rest of us need to (re)learn. He said:
That’s the problem with adults: they lose that child-like quality. And that’s the level of inspiration that’s so needed and is so important for creating and writing songs and for a sculptor, a poet or a novelist. It’s that same kind of innocence, that same level of consciousness, that you create from. And kids have it.
-Michael Jackson
This is why he liked being around kids. Not because he was a pedophile but because he was a kid himself – and they inspired him more than anything else. The song ‘Speechless‘ was written after a water balloon fight! That’s where he lived and created from – pure, simple, childlike fun. That creative place cannot exist within any box. The child known as Creativity cannot survive crammed inside some box of prejudice, definitions, expectations, religious, political, social or class strata. Michael knew that. Children know that. Instinctively. They may not be able to say it but they know it. Until some adult teaches them otherwise.
…And my best moments of creativity have often been spent with children. When I am around them, music comes to me as easily as breathing…
-Michael Jackson
The only people who don’t want anything from [MJ] are children. Everyone else wants something. They want to flirt with glory.
-Phil Collins
Blindness, ignorance, laziness, selfishness, egotism, and greed: all those things are what Michael Jackson was not – but because he was not – he was destroyed. We gladly accepted and kept those marvelous gifts that his being ‘different‘ enabled him to give us. But we as a society we never accepted him as a human being, and we collectively destroyed him for it and then left him to die.
What does that make us? It is said that humans are the most intelligent species. I don’t believe that. Because humans have the ability to think and reason – yet they do not. They don’t seem to possess as much empathy as animals yet humans would claim animals don’t feel empathy. But humans are wrong. Animals do feel empathy. We’ve heard the story of a dog rescuing another dog from the highway after he’d been hit by a car. We’ve heard of elephants gathering in a circle around one of their dead kin to mourn, for days.
Unlike humans, animals only kill to survive, their instincts all come from nature, and their fears are based on real threats. They are not driven by prejudice, ignorance, malice, revenge, hunger for power over each other or false fears and threats that don’t exist whipped up by some money-driven propaganda machine created by other groups of animals. Only humans do that.
It is astounding that even as far back as 1985, what was going to happen to Michael Jackson due to his enormous success was evident to many people like James Baldwin, Howard Bloom and others – even before it actually transpired.
They had to know that the lords of the status quo weren’t going to sit idly by and allow this innocent talent – this magical child – his celestial success without making him pay and pay dearly for it. Call it an act of revenge, greed, jealousy, a hate crime, ignorance, narcissism, prejudice or all of the a above and more. Like Michael himself said: “the bigger the star, the bigger the target“.
But it wasn’t only that. It was that Michael became a huge star from nothing – from dirt in a poor steel town in the midwest to a billionaire in just a few years – all well before the age of 40. And he was black to boot. And – very different than the rest of us in so many ways: artistically, emotionally, spiritually, physically (with constant changes due to health issues), and intellectually. His childhood and his entire life was such that the rest of us could only imagine what it was like for him.
He could not be put neatly into a box or category – he defied most of them, not deliberately as much as by his nature. And because of that too, he was considered an aberration to be ‘dealt with‘ and he was, in the harshest of terms – just like Howard and James knew he would be.
That we destroyed him because he was different instead of learning from him says more about what’s wrong with us than it does about what was wrong with Michael Jackson. This is a big mirror, and most people don’t want to look into it. Because what it reflects back to us about ourselves isn’t pretty and even worse, it hasn’t changed much over his lifetime or ours.
The problem isn’t with Elvis the serval. The problem isn’t with Ms. Williams-Bolar wanting her kids to have a decent education. The problem isn’t with me being unable to drive my dinky foreign car over top of all those cars ahead of me in rush hour traffic so as not to annoy some hotheaded jerk who evidently expected that of me. The problem is not and never was with Michael Jackson.
The problem is with The Box. The problem is with us. The problem is with the ‘system‘ and our own limited expectations and beliefs. It’s broken. We’re broken.
Some of the most wonderful people are the ones who don’t fit into boxes.
-Tori Amos
_ _ _
Essay © Seven Bowie, 2011
Photos and videos © their respective owners/creators
