I Love Whitney Houston

Though I only bought her very first album I love Whitney Houston. Now, everyone loves her because it’s bad form to speak ill of the dead right? Which is ironic when you consider that a person is least likely to care what you say about them when they are dead. Whitney Houston was a great singer. But we can’t stop there can we? We have to add words like troubled and that she had a drug problem. But you know what? Her troubles were hers…not ours. Her voice was a gift, one that we gladly paid to hear and listen to over and over and we still have the benefit of being able to hear the gift of her voice and praise the God that gave it to her.

She used drugs, more than likely it was recreational at first and progressed to a habit then an addiction. There are a lot worse things people can do than drugs. I’m certainly not condoning drug use. I never use even an over the counter or prescription drug but I understand that people who use drugs are not nefarious scum. They are people, like people who drink, who started using it just to have fun and became addicted. They did not become addicted to drugs they became addicted to feeling good, translation, better. See the people using drugs are troubled by a troubled world and they are trying cope with it in a way that they understand to provide them with some relief. I mean don’t we all do that? Some of us drink; others of us exercise; we eat to much, we watch porn, go to church EVERYDAY, pray, party all weekend, take antidepressants and valium, go to the shooting range, have sex with multiple people we don’t care about, do volunteer work and the list goes on and on. Some of these endeavors to cope are healthy and others are not but the truth is that we all, no matter our status in life, are trying to cope in a troubled world; we all have our own special demons to conquer. So just like Whitney we are people who are trying to deal with earthly challenges, longing for the simplicity of life when our biggest concern was whether or not the outfit we wore to school the next day would look cool to the cool kids… unless we were one of the cool kids then we really felt pressure to look cool.

Why is it that we vilify our heroes? We laud them. We place them on pedestals the size of a pin head and then we scoff at them when they fall off of it. We see people in Black, White, Yellow, Red, and Brown if you define race using the antiquated means of color, but the truth is we are all gray. Gray has light and shadows. Whitney Houston had bright lights and dark shadows but I am so grateful for her light.