Anthony Bourdain, a successful, wealthy, highly respected, celebrity, 
committed suicide.
Kate Spade
, a successful, wealthy, highly successful celebrity of a kind, committed suicide.
Both of those deaths are sad.
As a result, social media goes bonkers with people’s comments and platitudes.
You know what is even sadder?
The frighteningly high number of GLBTQI youth committing suicide every day in relative obscurity.
Also, unbearably sad? 
That young men of color are still being shot down daily by our racist police forces.
And unfathomably sad? That we have an administration which has gutted mental health and crisis services for those who, unlike wealthy celebrities, do not even have access to quality treatment, despite the U.S.Centers for Disease Control report just released 
which shows that suicide has increased in all but one state since 1999 and that more than half of the people who have done so had no known mental health diagnosis.
Finally, you know what is absolutely tragic? That things are so desperately wrong in our world that people believe 
that killing themselves may be their only choice.
If only folks would take the same amount of time they spend writing publicly about and/or lamenting over the unfortunate deaths of those with privilege and/or fame and use it to write Congress demanding corrections to the ongoing erosion of our healthcare and mental health and law enforcement systems.
https://www.ucsusa.org/action/phone-calls.html#.Wxrr2S_MzBJ
Or, mightn’t you become actively engaged in working against the rising tide of oppression and economic inequality we are seeing every feckin’ day?
Just a thought, my friends. Offered, with love, from a formerly suicidal person who knows the dark places.
