By Jeneane Jones
Growing up my Uncle Roland had one of the few record shops in South San Francisco, Calif. Sometimes we worked there on weekends, but mostly we just looked forward to walking the cramped shop’s aisles, crammed with albums from every genre, leafing through posters of the latest hit makers, and absorbing the preferential treatment we received as my mother’s brother’s only nieces and nephews. This meant that as a teen I and my siblings had certain privileges not readily available to the other kids in the neighborhood. Once a hit record started playing on the local soul station we could count the hours before we’d be able to play the 45 on the living room stereo-compliments of being well loved by Uncle Roland. This is how I was introduced to Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five.
 Michael Jackson 1958-2009 |
For the next five decades, Michael Jackson shared with me, and the world just what he did know about love. His love was unconditional. Despite difficult relations with his father, Michael loved family. Despite a fickle media which loved and in equal portions loathed him; Michael gave the media his best – in music, performance, and entertainment. He gave that gift to us with love. Unconditionally, without holding anything back.
During Tuesday’s memorial service at Staples Center in Los Angeles, family friend and civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton reminded us that Michael Jackson’s love of humanity gave us music that interconnected cultures, and brought together people from all ethnicities. His “We are the World” helped us relate to children starving in Africa as our own sisters and siblings, instead of faceless statistics reported on the nightly news. Rev. Sharpton said to the audience, “thank you Michael for eradicating barriers.”
As our country and the world moves the spotlight away from Michael and back to issues of health care, rising joblessness, ethnic fighting, nuclear war concerns, it seems we all have an opportunity to, as an old commercial put it, “be like Mike.” Commit ourselves to love unconditionally. Not to buy into to the people, or the issues that seek to reduce our attempts because of jealousy, hatred, pity, or diss-ease. I can commit to loving in everything I do; to communicate that love without regard for how it will be received. The concept can be traced to our scriptures, afterall. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase…For we are God’s fellow workers.” I can give my best, I can love my best, without regard for what someone else does. Michael did his thing, and I am expected to, must be committed to giving my best, in all things. I can trust and know that it is God who will make the best of what I do, despite my fears and limitations.
Michael Jackson had frailities like me, like all of us. He had demons, like all of us. His were laid bare for the country and the world to see, and to pick at, and to make bleed. But he did not let that stop him from planting seeds of love, with songs like, “I’m going to start with the man in the mirror.” With all his frailties, he never stopped planting new ideas, seeds of hope, and love for the world, for the world to reap.
Michael’s albums are still in the family stereo at our home in California. When we want to jam like the old days, we’ll get together and kick up the volume-singing out loud and loudly to lyrics that declare the ABC’s of love.
It takes courage to love. Michael taught us his ABC’s of what it takes to do it courageously.
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