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Whether or not celebrities have a positive or negative effect is difficult to answer with a 'yes' or a 'no'. All celebrities are all famous but that is where the similarity ends. We have young ones, old ones, nasty ones and good ones.

We have celebrities who break the law, openly taking drugs, getting drunk and violent in public and shop lifting but there again a well behaved, mature teenager would not want to copy them. If anyone goes out behaving in this way they probably would have anyway. We have had much publicised cases such as Michael Jackson being convicted of molesting children and O.J.Simpson found guilty of murder. We did not suddenly have a surge of people molesting children or murdering their wife just because the celebrities did. People did not suddenly decide to follow suit. If they had wanted to behave that way they would have already done so.

For every badly behaved celebrity we have there is another one who is squeeky clean, moral, legal and caring, who donates money to charity and never puts a foot wrong. Celebrities such as Cliff Richard are known for their spiritual and religious beliefs, their gentle nature and their peaceful life. If somebody wants to emulate someone famous they can emulate them as easily as they can the wrong doers. Some teenagers get it into their head that they must be rich and famous like their idol and they move heaven and earth to become a famous pop star, model or actress, but there is no harm in this. It is far better for them to aspire to something legal and moral, where they hope to earn a living, and spend their time on that, than hanging around on street corners wearing hoodies and robbing people with a flick knife wjhile planning to spend the rest of their life living on benefits. At least they have been spurred on to be ambitious and try to achieve something.

We are fascinated by celebrities because they are rich and famous, sometimes we are jealous of them, but it does not follow that we are lemmings who would jump off a cliff because they do. We are not that dumb. We may not be rich or famous but we have a brain. We can work out for ourselves what lifestyle we want. If we are going to follow others we are more likely to emulate our parents, neighbours, brother or sister, people we are in proper contact with and whose opinion matters to us.

Learn more about this author, Carmel Brulez.
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