Hello, Mr. Jackson's children were and are indeed home-schooled due to his fear of sending them to public schools where they would be assaulted by paparazzi and perhaps treated differently than other children. With his children he appears he was his higher self. Beth, you are being short-sighted and judgmental. The loss of any artist who had a strong and ongoing impact (and in this specific case, decades of impact artistically) will naturally create feelings in people nationwide (and worldwide sometimes). Mr. Jackson was part of the musical background of many of our years starting in the 1960s. His talents, his emotions seemed pure and unsullied. Yes, there are disturbing elements in his life about which we all may never know the entire truth about. It seems clear he identified with children too much and he needed to relate more healthily to persons of his own age group. He was very complicated, he was very talented (and talent is important; it is a gift), he was an abused child who carried a lot of damage who likely never got the help he required with his emotional damage from childhood. I believe what I feel is knowing the loss of sheer talent we all lost that his neglected emotional issues derailed.
With his Children it seemed we all got a glimpse into the part of him that truly carried his head and heart high and where he tried his best. That is touching. His daughter cut through a lot of things and allowed us to see that his Children truly had a real Father, not a freak or a walking joke as, sadly, Michael Jackson had allowed himself to slide into as a persona through very bad choices of company he kept around him in the 1990s-2005. Ms. Jackson, with her pure heart, restored dignity to a person many of us had almost-forgotten about, or had simply written off.
For me, who had loved him so much in the 60s-60s, I found his face too hard to deal with; I could not figure out what it meant--was it a form of self-loathing? A form of addiction to plastic surgery? Was he transitioning? Whatever it was, it was too complex for me and I cop to not feeling the compassion that I should have. I feel it now and I will allow that to process for as long as I want, Beth. To deny this complicated and super talented person is stirring up long-asleep emotions in people nationwide is you being willfully obtuse.
Mr. Jackson's life was one of many extremes, some he rose far above and some he succumbed to and numbed himself out to deal with. To see anyone very talented and blessed with a multiplicity of talents such as he was to end up looking as he ended up looking (with a surreal looking "mask" for a face), living overseas like he was doing much of the past years, seemingly lonely and isolated IS sad.
People are expressing empathy, a very human emotion. Through celebrities one admires or likes, one processes and learns. I don't think one person here would have traded places with Mr. Jackson, despite his riches and talents. I saw this reaction when Elvis Presley died. I think I realized part of the sadness is the understanding collectively as a nation that we need to treat our admired celebrities with more dignity and instead of cornering them so they cannot live normally, we should allow them to walk among us without fear of being jumped--and this all makes me realize our country needs stronger rules and standards re: paparazzi and how much they are paid and how they are given far too much freedom to do their "jobs"--thereby creating lives for some celebs that are akin to living like prisoners. I want to see Mr. Jackson's kids have a more normal life than he was granted.
One person who let his kids attend public schools was Paul McCartney but he also during those years lived in a far more quiet part of Scotland. He never covered them up, he took them everywhere on his tours in the 70s, 80s. I don't think Mr. Jackson ever had the inner core of steely strength that The Beatles each had as individuals though.
