When something substantive emanates from Hollywood, it’s worth taking note of. While so much of the celebrity world, and the pop-culture media, is egocentric, self-aggrandizing, and self-absorbed, infrequently does someone from that environment offer something visionary, insightful, inspiring, and non-hypocritical. Yet Ashton Kutcher did just that as he proffered some wisdom and hope to a youthful crowd this week.
Sunday evening at the Teen Choice Awards, Kutcher was presented the Ultimate Choice Award. His take on the significance of the award may have been implied by his joke about it, as he referenced it being the “old guy award.”
He then said that he wanted to share three things that he thought important for his young audience. And frankly, in retrospect, they’re three important concepts for people of any age...
How refreshing! To have someone from the Hollywood in-crowd promoting character and intelligence as “sexy, as opposed to the superficial and physical attributes touted by his entertainment contemporaries! He’s right; everything else is “crap;” the hairdos, the tattoos, the plastic-surgery-enhanced body parts, etc. ad nauseam.
The fact that Kutcher would use his elevated pop-culture status, and such a venue, to promulgate such verities is encouraging. But perhaps even more significant is the fact that video clips of his comments are going viral on the internet. That such positive, elevating, and ennobling rhetoric would resonate with so many around the country is not just a good sign, it’s an indication that there may be room to hope that the heart and soul of our society have not been terminally infected with the debilitating notion of entitlement.
AP award winning columnist Richard Larsen is President of Larsen Financial, a brokerage and financial planning firm in Pocatello, Idaho and is a graduate of Idaho State University with degrees in Political Science and History and former member of the Idaho State Journal Editorial Board. He can be reached at rlarsenen @ cableone.net.
