A Final(?) Note

Hi folks,

It's been more than a year since the soccer match against BYU that made Elizabeth Lambert famous, and she has gone on and played her senior year as a regular member of the University of New Mexico squad.  The team had a great season, earning their first appearance in the NCAA women's soccer tournament.  I just wanted to add here a little addendum, or final note, that will probably be the last entry in this blog.

I started this blog as more of a joke than anything.  And what immediately happened was that I started to receive a lot of hate mail.  I was actually a bit shocked at the amount of blind hatred, rage, and vitriol in the comments and e-mails I received.  It was unsettling to me.  Yet, the hate and rage leveled in my direction based on this modest website must have been less than 1/1000th of the hatred and rage that was directed at Elizabeth Lambert herself.  Probably much less.

After I saw the kind of hate mail that just the beginnings of this website inspired, I began to take the project and the defense of Elizabeth more seriously and realized that it was actually an important thing to speak out about and go against the grain on. 

I heard an author being interviewed on the radio the other day who had written a book about the nature of evil, and one interesting thing that he talked about sort of put Elizabeth Lambert's situation last year into perspective for me.  He was talking about how destructive and unhealthy our society's obsession with celebrities is -- not only for society at large, but for the celebrities themselves.  He said that when we stand these individuals up on a pedestal in front of hundreds of millions of people and project our fantasies, adulation, criticism, and scrutiny onto them, we almost inevitably destroy them.  The attention of hundreds of millions is unnatural, and impossible for most people to bear in any kind of healthy way.  The very concept of celebrity disallows our celebrities from being what they inevitably are: ordinary human beings. 

It's an interesting thing to think about.  We are all social creatures -- if we are obsessed over by millions of the people around us it must inevitably have an effect and a consequence on our lives and our psyches.  Even to be loved by millions, if they are strangers, if the foundation of their love is superficial or irrational, if they don't know who we are, if we are only a fantasy to them -- even to be loved by millions must be destructive to us.

How much more destructive to be hated by millions. 

But least we can say that celebrities have sought out this attention, have striven to climb onto their pedestals.  And at least we can say that infamous, hated criminals such as Ted Bundy or Osama bin Laden have committed infamous crimes.  We can't say those things about Elizabeth Lambert, although she was subject to the same attention and spotlight -- unexpectedly, unreasonably, and unforgivingly.  She wasn't subject to the love spotlight, she was subject to the hate one.

Which, if you really try to put it in perspective and wrap your head around it, is just sickening.

When we accept it as a group, as a society, to pick some unsuspecting person out and demonize them like that, like what happened to Elizabeth Lambert, we don't only hurt that one individual.  We hurt ourselves.  When we strip away a bit of that one individual's humanity, we strip away a little bit of our own humanity at the same time.  In the hate mail that I received thanks to this website, people had accepted it into their minds that Elizabeth Lambert was a monster, a creature, a sort of fantasy figure worthy of only hatred and scorn.  And they were unleashing negative energy in that direction, grateful for the chance at a release, for the figure of a monster to rage against.  It was very irrational. 

I think that the monster they were creating in their minds was really themselves, something inside of them that they were building up and raging against, not some girl who got caught up and out of hand in a rough soccer game. 

That's all.

Oh yeah, and besides all that, Elizabeth Lambert is super cool.  That's what I truly believe.  She's SO AWESOME!!!  And beautiful!  I bet she's smart, too, I think I read she was a scholar athlete or something.  Did you know she's famous?  Kawaii!  All the cool girls are famous.  I'm so happy she got to finish out her senior season and that the media has mostly left her alone this year it seems like.  It's the coolest thing of all to be famous but want to be left alone.  Plus being a soccer badass, that's cool, that's super cool.  D1, that's the best.  She's soooo awesome!!!  :)