A Meta-Open Letter

an open letter to the senders of open letters 

Dear Open Letter Sender,

I hope that this finds you well.

I want to tell you something about those communiques that you’ve been sending out lately. They are, without doubt, written with the best of intentions, but I think you should know this:

Nobody cares.

The artist or entity you are addressing these open letters to, more often than not, do not give a flying fuck what you think about their lives. Quite frankly, it is quite pretentious and if you are famous, and have the connects to simple tap the individual on the shoulder and address your concerns directly, the idea that you’d air out their dirty laundry indicates that you are someone not worth trusting. You are the type of person who’d tell a friend that his or her breath stinks in front everybody as opposed to doing so privately.

In the last few months or so, I’ve been seeing these open letters all though the internets, primarily to Kanye West and Miley Cyrus, pop culture’s main two provocateurs at the moment. Granted they are doing things that you may not necessarily agree with, but they have thousands of fans and people who actually possess an understanding of what it takes to maintain relevance in an industry where it’s really easy to become stale and boring. Granted, some outlandish and dare I say, crazy things have been said and done. This doesn’t necessitate being told that their thought process and method of doing things should be changed to fit your worldview. As a matter of fact, most of the time the acts committed are done simply to rebel against people who think like you: inside a box.

Perhaps you do this just to build your writing portfolio and rattle some cages (hell, I’m kind of doing that now). Here’s the thing, it’s just become quite annoying. Every day, when I go on my Facebook, I see HuffPost or other blogpost links for an open letter to someone who’ll never read it/or does not care what you think of their life. They are quippy and honest, but again, no one wants to be told how they should live their life, especially not by some internet random.

A professor I didn’t like in college told me something that I repeat all the time to people: “Opinions are like butts, everybody has one.” I mean, there’s nothing wrong with expressing an opinion but to force it on someone is just wrong. It’s no different than proselytizers on the Subway telling you to hand your life to Christ because you’re living wrong, despite the fact that this nut hasn’t met you a day in your life. Open letters sometimes are great, especially if they being sent to politicians, who need to give a fuck about every opinion its constituency has, or to people who actually need an open letter sent to them, not limited to, but including, media gatekeepers, CEO’s of companies that refuse to hire or promote people of color, homosexuals, and women, and public figures whose actions negatively impact people of a certain group (e.g. the pastor of a church, or the Chancellor of a school system).

In short, the whole open letter thing to celebrities needs to die a swift death. Don’t like what they do? Stay off the internets for a while. Read a book. Learn how to knit. Fly a kite. If you have children, raise them to not be like the people that you disdain so much that you must sit and write a quippy 500 word letter to them.

With love,

Jesse P.