View source for Essay:A Startling Revelation About the Celebrity Known as Jewel

==by [[User:Dissident|Dissident]]==
How many people are familiar with the beautiful singer Jewel? If you are, then you will likely also be aware of the typically faux Horatio Algiers-style "rags to riches" claims fabricated by her PR managers to make it seem like she became famous and successful despite growing up in abject poverty and engaging in many types of very self-destructive and unethical behavior.

Her online bios give us the skinny on some of the bad things she supposedly did: "...fell in with street gangs, dated older men and even shoplifted." Isn't that interesting? Dating older men--whose personalities and intentions are in no way mentioned or even alluded to in the above statement (but are probably readily assumed by the typical reader, so no need to waste time asking those questions anyway)--is considered right up there on the Badness Scale as getting involved with violent gangbangers and stealing. I mean, how could our darling little Jewel possibly sink so low? After all, hanging out with violent gangbangers and being a party to God knows what type of activities they were engaged in, where typically many innocent people are hurt--such as taking things that do not belong to you--is one thing; but, going out with older men?! C'mon now, why couldn't Jewel have simply stuck to all of those lesser evils! God in heaven, where were the parents?!

Of course, since we know effectively nothing about the nature of those older men she dated, is it possible those older men may have cared for her? Or may have respected her as a person even if a mutual sexual attraction was the major factor keeping them together? Or may have treated her as an equal despite her being "just a kid"? Or may have bought her dinner and paid some of her bills for her, since her bios always claim that she was earth-shatteringly poor at the time? And they may have driven her from place to place, wherever she wanted to go, so that she didn’t have to use her own wheels and spend money she supposedly didn't have on gas and vehicle maintenance? 

But who the hell cares if any of the above was the case, right? Girls dating older men is icky, for Christ's sake! I mean, c'mon now, how many hateful vigilantes do you see expending effort to entrap or hunt down gangbangers who routinely murder people and report their identities and personal information to the police? Or how many vigilantes do you ever see boasting online about hunting down people who are inclined towards stealing from the local Wal-Mart? Answer: effectively ''none,'' certainly not in comparison to all of those determined folks you see expending exhausting efforts to hunt men in chat rooms who commit the ultimate evil of having cyber-sex with underage girls or boys. After all, violent criminals who routinely take people’s lives for often petty reasons and those who regularly steal property that does not belong to them, are small potatoes compared to those who commit the ultimate crime of stealing the “innocence” of adolescents in chat rooms, let alone in person during mutually desired interactions.
  
We should be thankful that all the vigilantes out there have their priorities straight. As concerned parents who want to protect our children, we need to be far more concerned about the age of the person our kids are dating regardless of whether or not he/she may be a decent person, rather than whether or not they may be hanging around with truly dangerous street gangs who may get them involved in activities like drug dealing, or may beat them up or even murder them to prevent them from singing like a canary to the cops. Or whether or not our kids are hanging around with same-aged peers who encourage them to risk a quick trip to juvie and a legal record as a result of stealing property from a store. Granted, their older boyfriend (or girlfriend) may be a basically decent person who truly cares about your child, and he might have no interest in getting them involved in anything related to violence or stealing; but he (or she) still might be engaging in mutually consensual sexual relations with your precious, innocent child, and we can’t stand for that!

Our real-life vigilantes are heroes and bad-asses who hunt the dangerous people that truly commit acts of demonstrable harm against other people, like gangbangers, arsonists, home invaders, and serial killers, not simply those who violate our moralistic conceptions of "innocence" and propriety, right? They are brave, self-sacrificing heroes that help the police make our society safer from dangerous people who seek to hurt us in demonstrably provable ways, correct?

To be clear, I am ''not'' encouraging or condoning vigilantism for any reason here, but simply making a point that vigilantes outside the movies and comic books do not tend to be the brave and tough individuals you see in those fictional mediums, but rather the type of people who "punch down" as far as they can go. Real life vigilantes tend to be motivated not by truly heroic inclinations, but by ''emotional'' impulses, bullies who seek easy targets in society to create the veneer of being heroes out for "justice." In reality, it's all about image and the protection of paradigms that help keep younger people forcibly in place as third-class citizens bereft of civil rights related to speech, expression, and access to information that might help them make informed choices outside the control of parents and the state.

The gangbangers that Jewel allegedly associated with may be a far greater threat to your child’s life and safety than adults they may share a mutual attraction with, but at least those gangbangers are most likely to be in the same general age group of your child. Thus, that represents the lesser of the two evils since there is no chance a 15-year-old gang member could manipulate a girl of the same age into thinking she wants to have sex when she actually doesn’t compared to a “slick” and “worldly” man 20 years her senior. And of course, hanging around with unscrupulous same-aged peers who encourage her to shoplift are not stealing anything as valuable as her innocence; they are simply stealing material items intended for sale that do not belong to them from someone else. It’s better to lose an iPod or cell phone on your display shelf than your innocence, since the value of the two cannot possibly be compared, right? As I said, we need to have our priorities straight, and these vigilantes show us the right way. 

And what the hell is it with these older men who would be so depraved as to find a beautiful young girl with a perfect figure that a supermodel would kill to have, and a perky and energetic personality who is very uplifting to be around, attractive "in that way"? What the hell could those men possibly see in those girls that they couldn't see in the latter's grandmothers instead? What the hell ever happened to their sense of decorum? What does it say about their character that they were willing to offend the sensibilities of their society by dating "inappropriate" partners? I just don't "get" these guys and their totally inexplicable attractions to young teen girls, let alone why an obviously sophisticated adult would want to waste his time hanging around with a "mere kid" instead of her obviously intellectually and culturally superior grandmother, who should also be far easier on the eyes to every single guy over 21 on the planet than any girl under 18, correct?
 
Come to think of it, what the hell was I thinking for actually believing that young girls could be amazing individuals who are attractive on so many levels that I would be honored to date several of them? I need to climb up out of the gutter along with those other older men who offended our kind society with their ghastly dating choices. I should go and join a violent street gang or a burglary ring instead; at least in those cases, society would find my destructive actions forgivable, and I wouldn’t have to worry about being hunted and stalked--or entrapped--by determined vigilantes in addition to the police. 

As for Jewel, I will be forever disappointed in her after finding out this unforgivable info about her past. I could live with her being a lover of violent gangbangers and a thief, as I'm certainly an open-minded guy who is not quick to judge. But that thing with being a lover of older men is just too much for even an enlightened and open-minded liberal like me to deal with, I'm sorry to say. I mean, as tolerant as I am, we gotta draw the line ''somewhere'', am I right?
[[Category:Dissident's essays]][[Category:Essays]]