Ebenezer Scrooge changed over night. Sure, it took the visits of three ghosts, but…Paris Hilton might change too.
Already she seems to have made more progress than Martha Stewart ever did!
Apparently, Hilton’s maybe-life-isn’t-just-about-parties transformation began before her jail term commenced. In late May, she was seen affiliating with such books as the Holy Bible, some undisclosed bits of Buddhist wisdom, and Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist.”
And now Hilton tells Barbara Walters that she has struggled with attention deficit issues! Her gaze within allows us to look deep, and we all realize that life for this affluent girl hasn’t been a bowl of cherries.
Here’s a terrific blog post on Hilton’s potential for redemption written last month by Jabulani Leffall. An excerpt:
Wouldn’t it be extraordinary if she really got inspired by reading about Saul of Tarsus’s transformation from persecutor and murderer to Apostle Paul the saint? What if she applied Job’s unshakable faith or even Prince Siddhartha Gautama’s — later called Buddha — lifelong quest for knowledge, self-realization and enlightenment? Maybe she can even copy out the words of the dictionary like Malcolm X from Aardvark to Zephyr and come out of confinement saying things like, “freedom over fallacy, human dignity over heresy, substance over style, purpose over persiflage. That’s Hot.”
She can then write a memoir about time spent behind bars, talk about her “new” vision, convince Rick and Kathy Hilton — her parents — to open up a “Homeless Hilton.” She’ll stop wasting her life and become America’s Lady Diana, decrying the current standards of institutionalized sexism, racism and classism. She’ll be an advocate for victims of progress, an articulate orator warning about the negative effects of globalization. Maybe she’ll even go to college, marry a rich liberal do-gooder or progressive conservative and eventually become a first lady whose life is to be emulated not for the way she wore Chanel but for the way she channels perseverance, for the way she stared in the face of a personal abyss and did not go gently into that good night…
In the end, what will really happen will probably be something akin to a happy medium between total metamorphosis and continued stasis. One thing is for sure, we could all learn from Paris Hilton’s experience about how to be less duplicitous, less hypocritical and less frivolous, about how to seek improvement not from a place of desperation but as an everyday endeavor. Sadly though we continue. We’ll pretend not to care about Paris until we do and then we won’t again until we do. A lot of us will say never again and most of us will be pious for a time and then end up doing whatever it is we do…..again. The world is counting on you, Paris Hilton, to set an example! Or not.
I say, if Hilton finds the right teacher and gives a yoga practice ten years of her time, she might have Seane Corn potential.
It’s not going to be easy, of course, but stranger things have happened.