Rest assured, there was a time when we didn’t know everything.
My wife Victoria and I were having a chat last night about Michael Jackson and how every single sordid detail will eventually come up. Why? Because it sells magazines, it gets web hits, it gets forwarded around like wildfire….because WE keep insisting that we want to know everything.
I remembered there was a time that people didn’t have to know everything. During FDR’s term as president, he was crippled by polio and in a wheelchair, but the press never published pictures because they didn’t want a “weak” president being shown.
But in the early 70s, the Watergate scandal broke the dam. The government we sorta trusted was now under a microscope. The unimaginable did happen. American leaders did despicable things, celebrities had lots of skeletons in their closets and so everything came under scrutiny.
So now, when a Steve McNair gets shot in a side romance gone bad, we’ll hear how it was done, pictures of them will be splattered all over, while a trusting wife and four kids try to make sense of it all.
It’s a quandary: we have the right to know, but do we really NEED to know?
The choice is ours, but know that you answer that question with every tabloid magazine you pick up, every dirt-digging website you visit and each time you pass along some titillating tidbit.
I’d love to keep going, but I’m trying to track down the location of Michael Jackson’s brain.

Tim Hunter