Reply-To: "Stu" <[log in to unmask]>
From: "Stu" <[log in to unmask]>


The Britney Spears in Your Life


This isn't a piling-on piece about Britney Spears' out-of-control 
life. She has enough people alternately diagnosing and dismissing 
her. Even as the TV newscasters tell about the latest bout in court, the most
recent episode of partying, or introduce the latest censored photo, 
they tend to roll their eyes. She generates a lot of tongue-clucking 
these days. She just seems hopeless.

Ah, but that's the point. Or, at any rate, it is the beginning of a 
point somebody needs to make about the latest young celebrity on a 
path to self-destruction. Is there nobody who cares about her? Will nobody
risk telling her the truth? Doesn't anybody love her enough to throw 
her a lifeline?

Practically everybody has a Britney Spears in her life. There is a 
friend or family member, a colleague at work or member of her church 
whose life is clearly spinning sideways on a sheet of ice and about to
crash.

It's a younger brother who has been experimenting with drugs--while 
racking up a couple of DUI's along the way.

It's a brother-in-law who has left his wife and their two children to 
live with someone half his age.

It's a friend who has four or five credit cards maxed out from 
shopping binges, and whose idea of solving the problem is to get another card.

It's the deacon who was arrested a few weeks ago for stealing a 
computer from his company--and whose absence from church has not been 
mentioned.

Wouldn't you want someone to reach a hand to you? It's the person in 
your office who used to be cheerful and dependable but who has missed 
a lot of work lately--and whose presence complicates life for everyone.

See what I mean now? My point is not to moralize about, or to pass 
another sanctimonious judgment on Ms. Spears. It is to look in from 
the perspective you and I share to wish somebody would reach out to her.

Maybe there are people who really care about her. Maybe they have 
tried. And maybe she has rebuffed them all. That happens sometimes!

More often than not, though, people crash and burn because the people 
around them look away.

Alcoholics, philanderers, religious bigots, incorrigible gamblers, 
clinically depressed people, tax
cheats--the list just goes on and on. People have life issues that 
have them by the throats. It will likely take a professional to help 
them dig out. But somebody who is close to, and credible with them, 
has to take the first step to intervene. Get in his face. Let her 
know how serious things are.

You don't know Britney Spears? Don't think you can help her? Okay. 
But what about the person you do know who is on a similar path? You 
may be that soul's best hope of recovery from a nose-dive into oblivion.

Even if you make the effort, there are no guarantees--except that 
major problems don't solve themselves.

If the shoe were on the other foot, wouldn't you want someone to 
reach a hand to you?