Michael, Diana, John and Yoko

The end of MJ's memorial, with Germaine Jackson singing "Smile" by Charlie Chaplin - said it all. When we have a figure that through luck and talent and tenaciousness gets out on that stage in front of us, with handlers like corporations and governments flailing at them from the wings but unable to control them, that star becomes a child of Peace.

When Michael, Diana, John and Yoko (and Charlie from an earlier time) worked free of society's conditioners, they turned to their world audience and spoke as Peace radicals. They also showed a child-like quality. They startled us with creative play in public, with no nay-sayers stopping them. They could touch untouchables in public, take limbless children onto their laps, act guileless about their sensual bodies, stay in bed for weeks for Peace, build amusement parks for orphans, travel nearly anywhere on the earth and connect with children. All the powerful could do was carefully watch, and deliver indictments or bad press when things got out of hand.

Do you remember when you were a child? War and the aggressions of expansive economies were something that we had to learn. At the age of, say four or five or six or seven, when we looked up at the night sky with wonder, we didn't populate that limitlessness with Darth Vaders and Star Wars missiles at the beginning. Did we? Or am I talking myself into this? Didn't we start out our lives, coming from our mother's womb, believing in Peace? Weren't we more like Michael, Diana, John and Yoko? And don't they reverse us in time, back to the nobility of our first instincts? Am I remembering this right? Am I just making this up?

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