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Britney Spears has a mountain to climb to get her life back on track, and it's largely due to the so called fans that pursue and hang onto her every word and deed as if it were the most important thing in their lives.

For centuries mankind has felt an uncontrollable need to build idols, and without exception they have all proved to have feet of clay. This is especially true of the relatively new type of " Celebrity Idol".

Why do we do it? Is it some deep inner need to worship something that we long to possess ourselves, but for whatever reason cannot attain?

There are countless examples of this phenomenon from pretty little Norma Jean - remember her?
When the cracks started to appear in the manufactured Goddess that was Marilyn Monroe, they were on her like a pack of hungry wolves eager to see yesterday's idol fall into the mud. Then there was the King - elevated to sainthood after his death, but in life just an ordinary country boy at heart, becoming increasingly desperate as he tried to make sense of his own super stardom.

Hollywood is littered with the corpses of broken idols, the list goes on and on - Jean Harlow, James Dean, Montgomery Cliff, Dorothy Dandridge. Their lives all followed the same pattern of great hope and brilliance at the outset but fading rapidly into loneliness and despair. Think about it, - it must be very cold and lonely at the top of the tree and there is only one way to go and that is down.

You have to be a very tough cookie indeed to keep afloat. Madonna has managed it because she is astute enough to know that the only way to keep the public interested is by constantly re- inventing yourself.

At the end of the day these people that are placed by us so high on their teetering pedestals are just like you and me, and the bitter pill that they must ultimately swallow is that fame and all the trappings of stardom are only transitory and will not sustain the soul.

I hope with all my heart that this very talented young woman - so lost and surrounded by people with little or no wisdom, can somehow find her way back to a state of normality and peace but it is a tall order that proved too much for many of her predecessors.

On a positive note why don't we all say a quiet prayer for Britney and leave the poor girl alone to finally focus on the things in her life that really matter.

Don't forget that none of us need be hopelessly lost for "God works in strange ways his wonders to perform".

Learn more about this author, Valerie Kelly.
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