I have never really understood this whole fixation people have with celebrities, especially when they die.

First of all, you weren’t related to them, didn’t know them personally, and their death will not likely have any lasting impact on your life: So why the heck are you crying? I understand that their work may have had some sort of impact, i.e. “That song got me through a bad break-up,” or “That movie always reminds me of a friend who passed.” I get that, but is it really worth that much grief now that they’ve died?

And for the record, most people I’ve asked don’t even have the aforementioned excuses for being sad. Usually it’s: “Oh, he/she was so talented, we’ve lost a great artist,” or “They were so young, it was too early.”

To address the first (I’m going to use a few recent celebrity deaths as examples): Whitney Houston may have been very talented, but what the heck has she done for the last 20 years? She has earned massive amounts of ridicule and scorn, from many of the same people that now sing her praises to heaven, I might add, for abusing drugs.

I know many of you will hate me for such generalizations about the singer/actress, and I understand she hasn’t really spent the last 20 years in a room clutching her crack-pipe, but she hasn’t exactly been out curing world hunger.