I think a lot. In fact, recently, one of my friends even gave me the quote, “Don’t think so much when it isn’t warranted.” That friend was completely right. I think entirely too much and usually I think about the wrong things. I did, however, misinterpret the quote. I was under the conclusion that thought was the thing that needed to be slowed down or changed, but I was wrong. It was and is the things that I was thinking about that needed to be shifted.

You can’t weigh or measure thoughts. You can’t feel them, see them, hear them, or taste them. Thoughts seem like a weaker version of an action. It takes nothing to think, it takes everything to move. Well, so I thought. A friend passed on a video of Oprah talking about her role in “The Color Purple” and how she acquired it. I left the video with two thoughts: Oprah looks really bad with no make-up and more importantly, thoughts have an extraordinary amount of power. Like most people, I tried my finest to apply this to my life. I watched what I think and I released what I believed in. This isn’t a new practice, but more so a reminder to keep practicing what I know to be true. I always try to make a habit of using my thoughts as way to be the designer of my future. I’m Donatella, my life is Versace.

Usually, once I apply these things to my life, it’s a personal perversion of mine to apply it to culture, especially pop culture. I look around and find myself sounding like an old, black church woman on her porch, but this world seems progressively more and more insane. It’s hard to believe we’re not in our last days. What’s my meter of this? Fame. For me, fame and how one gets it shows just exactly where we are as a society.

In my mother’s heyday and before that, there was very specific ways you can get that Hollywood fame. You had to be able to do something. You needed some kind of exceptional talent and usually it needed to be complimented with striking good looks like James Dean or a voice that kept on going like Aretha Franklin.

Years later, Andy Warhol became popular and his Factory transformed what exactly it was to be famous. The idea of “15 minutes of Fame” was created and bestowed on a wanting society. Therein created stars like Candy Darling and Edie Sedgwick that were celebrities more for being declared celebrities than earning it. Sounds fun, right? Well, it was fun. It spawned years and years of socialites and collectors of attention to become household names for no good reason.

Fast forward to today, to you reading this article, and what’s the result? A slew of girls giving out blowjobs for twitter followers, royal weddings that pay millions instead of cost millions, and a culture with their priorities totally out of whack. Simultaneously, I look around and see protesters crying for help and American politics going deeper and deeper into despair.

We debate, we protest, we elect, but it seems like there is no change. We do all of these actions, but we seem to steer clear of any significant shift in the world we live. Maybe, it’s time for America to sit its ass down and think. Collectively, if we just think about the things that warranted our thought the most, our problems wouldn’t be so bleak. Granted, everyone doesn’t sit around obsessing over pop culture, but we’re all guilty of obsessing over trivial things. Our Republicans obsess over how much anal sex two married men might have. Democrats obsess over how racist someone else might be that didn’t vote for Barack Obama. Independents obsess over when exactly marijuana is going to be legal.

There’s really no wonder why the world is in the disarray that it is in. See, giving thought to things that warrant little thought is the sickness of an entire nation. We’re all victims of it and we’ll continue to be victims of it, until we re-focus on what’s most important: us.

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