Journalist Betty Kyallo and head of the Catholic Church Pope Francis have a lot in common. Both are human.
It’s important to start here, because it’s the thing that’s often forgotten about them.
Both have the job of spreading the truth through their professions. Both are celebrities who are worshipped by their fans, albeit from different altars.
And both use Twitter accounts to share tit-bits about the goings-on in their personal and professional lives.
But perhaps the thing that binds them the most is that people are more interested in the gritty and dirty details of their personal lives than in their vocations, noble as they may be.
For Pope Francis, this was evident when he lost his cool and slapped a woman’s hand as he greeted pilgrims at the Vatican on New Year’s Eve.
In a video seen worldwide, the woman is seen reaching out for his hand and forcibly grabbing it as he tries to greet a child. A visibly angry Pope slaps her hand away, much to the chagrin of the world.
Twitter users went crazy in displaying their horror, with a few going as far as to call his actions misogynistic.
He later apologised, adding that he too, loses patience. The unsaid words were that he is also human.
He knows only too well that every so often the world needs to be reminded of this.
While “sorry” is not something we hear often from leaders and should therefore be applauded, his words say more about us and our expectations of perfection than they do about him.
For, what was the Pope supposed to do? Give the woman his other hand so she could grab to fulfil the “turn the other cheek” commandment?
Or perhaps he should have gently talked her out of what clearly looked like an invasion of his privacy and a violation of his body? Maybe this would have assuaged the ire of the public.
Interestingly, no apology was forthcoming from the grabber. At least not one that’s publicly recorded. We wouldn’t care as much, anyway.
For Betty Kyallo, the hype machine does not shut down when she leaves the set of the TV station she works for.
It must be a very difficult thing to watch strangers, in the space of a few words, construct and deconstruct what they imagine your life to be.
It must be doubly hard for her because she is a woman and her actions and words are judged in a harsher way than a man’s.
The latest hashtag dedicated to her personal life, #TheSomaliGuy, was nauseatingly bigoted and can’t be repeated here.
Another journalist, Oliver Mathenge, also found himself trapped in an awkward space where he had to respond to attacks on his wife about a photo posted of her that the online community did not approve of. He tweeted that the trolls should get themselves a life.
It’s true that celebrities profit from the boundless nosiness about their lives through endorsements and all that jazz, but this does not negate their need for privacy.
They are human beings, after all, and they need the space and air to grow and reflect about their lives.
Our interest and obsession in the details of celebrities’ lives, or stargazing, as some refer to it, is perfectly normal, and this has been well-documented by scientists.
In an article titled “Why we are obsessed with celebrities”, published in Psychology Today, Dr Nathan Heflick writes that one of the reasons we love celebrities so much is that they form an essential part of culture.
They have made it in the worldview we are so entrenched in and by worshipping them (to an extent) we feel as if we are participating in this hugely important cause or belief system.
Perhaps those of us who are not celebrities may never fully appreciate the challenges of living life as public figures, but it should not stop us in any way from looking at them as fellow humans who are as heavily flawed and as heavily prone to making mistakes as we are. So let’s cut them some slack.
