LESSONS IN NOTHINGNESS

What transcendent lessons might we learn from Britany’s downward careen?

“Absolutely none,” you’ll wearily answer. A once-innocent child, coached by her handlers and her own narcissism, has decomposed into an annoying, but entertaining, puddle of schadenfreude.

The expected litany of cliches: Britney . . . “too much too soon,” “both a cause and result of the slack-jawed empty-headedness of today’s youth,” “a symptom of society’s pervasive decadence,” “a grotesque image of self-indulgence gone wild,” “a basically stupid, big-breasted girl co-opted by greedy phonies,” “simply self-destructive.”

Beyond all the clichés, the transcendent message is to let Britney choke on her own vomit. Stop with the pity. Stop with the excuse-making. Stop with the compassion. Stop the limousines dropping her off and then taking her back to 90210 after her field trips to rehab. Marginalize her as a loser, just another deflowered flower out on the street on a collision course with coked up ‘ho-dom.

Britney’s path has been sabotaged by greedy faux-friends. Nonetheless, her path has been paved with gold. She blew it herself. She had assistance, but she also was guilty of rejecting a better way, presumably inculcated by parents, school, church, and small-town values.
But now transcend Britney and consider people living in squalor on the streets.

Most of us do not pity them, nor make excuses, nor show them understanding and the benefit of doubt, nor send limousines to pick them up and drop them off. At best, maybe they get is a corndog and a mat in a shelter, then to be booted back on the streets at 6:00 AM. They roil in their own vomit, some of them because they blew it via alcohol, drugs, or shiftlessness.

But a majority of the homeless are out on the streets due to no fault of their own. They are there because of domestic violence, mental illness, lack of education and marketable job skills. Only a small minority of them will ever be in place to transition out of homelessness, because those resources are so pitifully scarce.

The homeless should not be relegated to the streets, but they are. Britney, in her lucrative self-inflicted destructiveness, should be. But she will likely never be relegated to a taste of the mean streets, but she should be.

This is the transcendent lesson of Britney’s self-debauchery: We who are warmly ensconced in the Upper Middle Class, just like me, have never tasted the bitterness of the streets, a descent from phony self-sufficiency to pathos to nothingness. Maybe an encounter with helplessness would so enlighten us to come away humbled, more cherishing of that which is sacred in our lives, understanding of the reality of the human condition, no longer so oblivious of love of neighbor and love of God.

A friend of mine, an orthodox rabbi in his 50’s, took the self-challenge to the extreme, at the advice of a Presbyterian colleague. My friend would take only the clothes on his back, a clean towel, and a knapsack. He would randomly pinpoint a town, fly there, and – devoid of any money or resources – find his way back home.

Upon his return, he spoke to me of the nights spent in shelters, sleeping on the streets, begging to sweep out a bar for $2 an hour, where the best place to hitchhike are (truck stops), learning how to beg, adapting to nothingness. My friend, a genius, scion of great rabbinical families, Johns Hopkins credentials, got a third of the way back home, from Buffalo to Atlanta, in a week.
He know that he would return to Upper Middle Class-dom. Regardless, the changes to him brought on not only stories, but encounters so core-shattering and life-shaking that they gave birth in him empathy, understanding, and self-doubts that he had never before experienced. The transformation of a life.

This is precisely what Britney, stripped of all pretension, needs. It’s likely what every one of us needs: an encounter with nothingness, a descent into relentless urban squalor.

Need we ourselves go on that same sobering journey? Is that what it would take to open our hearts and souls?