Too, Too Sad

The downside of celebrity is that you are so visible. That when societal sins such as drunk driving and possession of serious narcotics and violations of probationary terms are levelled against you, you are then required to be instructed in no uncertain terms that the court is not amused.

"I did the best I could to balance jobs and showing up. I was working.... I was working with children. I wasn't taking it as a joke... I wanted to come back and make you happy."

That this young woman is sincere in her grief at having to pay the price of taking insufficient notice of what she was doing with her life - how it impacted rather deleteriously both on herself and on society at large, and now, as a result, she was being sentenced to the horribly ignominious sentence of a 90-day jail sentence - seems genuine enough.

We all feel rather sorrowful over events in our lives which, through a sense of inattention or perhaps blase disregard of the harm it could do, came back to haunt us in ways we could never have imagined, and which we truly regretted. Not the acts themselves perhaps that caused the consequences to be imposed, but the fact that the consequences imposed themselves.

Drunk driving and cocaine possession are no mere illicit trifles. Nor is the fact that a beautiful young woman with sufficient talent to make a name for herself in her profession as an actor, succumbed to becoming an alcoholic. Obviously, much has gone wrong in this young woman's life. Perhaps expectations that she might achieve a level of success beyond her abilities.

Perhaps that her life would become a magical fairyland. Frustration and disappointment can ruin lives, even lives of young and comely and talented individuals. Whom the public views as 'having everything', so what could they conceivably want that they didn't already have? The human mind and consciousness is a strange, ungovernable beast.

She is only 24. She can learn from this event that appears to her now to be so immediately catastrophic. She now knows for a certainty that actions have consequences. Privilege and celebrity will not shield anyone from paying for those stern lessons.

Poor Lindsay Lohan, poor child. I'd hear the name before, but would never have been able to guess whether she was a popular singer, or perhaps an actor. Now I know. And now she is aware that the laws that govern all, govern her as well.

And yes, her plight, slight as it is, does stir the heart.