Celebrities Don’t Kill People, Regular People Do

Celebrities Don’t Kill People, Regular People Do by Roxanne McDonald

We vacillate with the opinions, go back and forth with the amount and kind of punishment a drunk driver should get. But when it’s Paris, we go soft. [No pun intended]

Okay, enough is enough. Celebutante Paris Hilton gets a drunk-driving conviction. She tries to get out of taking responsibility for her wrong-doing. She finally gets jail time. She can’t eat, can’t sleep, and can’t—according to TMZ reports quoting psychiatrist Dr. Charles Sophy, “participate in a meaningful defense” due to her being “emotionally distraught and traumatized” over her required jail sentence…so the trial is postponed till August.

A conveniently “private” medical condition suddenly erupts, disturbing enough that a convicted person is released after serving three days.

Now, the definitions of what constitutes a criminal act are revisited. How much culpability is taken into account and somehow miraculously reconsidered: a poor person, a regular guy or gal, will put at risk loved ones the world over should he or she drink and drive. But if a celebrity drinks and drives, the risk is diminished, discounted? Or the value of civilian life is somehow now measured on a different, special scale?

Add to this (the not new) discussions of how if prisoner #1223344 couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, and was “distraught” over having been incarcerated to pay a debt to society, as it is deemed, that prisoner would get little more than a tough shit response.

I am one of those who has gone soft and back to hard again about how Paris is being given a bit too much favoritism, so I don’t have much right to bitch about the back and forth, the indictment and rescinding….

But bottom line is this: my best friend was killed by a drunk driver who said to his passenger girlfriend from his hulking two-ton automobile when he saw Debbie and Pete on a motorcycle, coming in the opposite direction on that windy river road, “Watch me scare these people.”

The car threw Deb from the bike to the river, but not before jamming her leg in between the bike’s sprocket and wheel, thus tearing her leg from her body and sending the rest of her to die in the icy cold of river and night.

He was drunk. If his name was Paris Hilton, would he have been given a different fate?
Now, true, Paris didn’t kill anyone, so don’t go all coo coo and misinterpret my final analogy, here.

And know that I know there is a faction of our culture that would get off on reverse discrimination, those who would enjoy seeing any celebrity suffer just for being a celebrity. That is not my intention. That is not my point.

The double or triple standards is. The Yahoo mail service now has introduced ads into the email, but on its complaint blog has a warning that any spam will result in eternal banishment.

The police officer driving ninety-five just for the hell of it can stop any motorist for doing the same.

How does the impact change with the title…or entitlement? How or when does the crime become justified? How are one little rich girl’s antics more pardonable? And how do the feelings of someone get regarded so differently according to degree of whining, cover-up, and power play?

Celebrity Spider Paris Hilton links

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