Actualizing

 BRITNEY SPEARS says she hasn't watched the popular documentary about her, "Framing Britney", but that from what she has seen of it, it made her cry for two weeks. So she must've caught a fairly good glimpse, or maybe a bad one. Britney, as everyone who reads scandal sheets or watches celebrity television knows,has had it rough. A few too many romantic entanglements of the volatile kind, maybe a few to many mind altering substances, and just maybe a bit too much of the proverbial overbearing parents. The "Free Britney" movement, to liberate her from custodial guardianship, is tinged with a tad of irony. We should all be so fortunate as to be fighting for the freedom to do what we choose with fifty million dollars.Britney may have been a victim of the Judy Garland Michael Jackson malady:too much parental pressure too early in life to work hard and succeed, too much rehearsal time and not enough down time.The rest of the equation is too much fame and fortune at too early an emotional age.Elvis Presley belongs in a different but similar category. He didn't have the parental pressure to succeed in entertainment business and to become famous and wealthy, he was successfully driving a truck as an eighteen year old. It was a job he arguably should have kept. What ruined Elvis was what seemingly ruined the other three, the fame and fortune itself.I had a friend from China who moved to my university town from shanghai, and immediately figured out America. "You Americans are the loneliest people in the world. You care more about your dogs and cats than each other".How true, I thought. Guilty as charged. But we like it that way. In the United States of Alienation we chase fame and money because we cannot imagine that there is anything better available. When a very few of us obtain these commodities, those who have them realize that they are not worth all the trouble and stress it took to get them, and, thinking them liquid, try to exchange them for for love or drugs. That doesn't work either.Genuine relationships with ourselves if no one else, and a connection to the greater community through productive enterprise has always worked, and still does. Britney, it turns out, is a great dancing teacher and much beloved by her students, little girls, while Elvis drove a pretty mean tractor trailer.