WITNESS: A ROLE MODEL FOR THE AGES....

I haven’t done extensive research but I don’t think we have seen any precedence quite like this….We have had celebrities who have done very noble things, dashed their fame, and gone to under-served parts of the world (Audrey Hepburn comes to mind) but it just might be that Angelina Jolie is redefining the potential for what a celebrity (with power and wealth) can do to transform the lives of others….her empathy is spellbinding. It is like looking at the sun; it is too bright to fully take in….

I was talking to my daughter today and I told her that I couldn’t think of any celebrities who, when you think of them, you think of something other than what made them famous….I told her that Angelina Jolie is an exception..(for me, at least). There are no doubt other celebrities who have parlayed their fame and power into assuaging human suffering and trying to solve the world’s deepest humanitarian problems….Thank God for Bono!…there are many others….but Angelina is a true “Wonder Woman” . she makes Lara Croft look farcical and small………she is heroic…it is quite a gulp to read her Day Planner. It makes her day job (acting) look glaringly frivolous….

She wasn’t always like this …she was a queen of glam…an elite model…and an actress in high demand. She played action heroes….….she was married to the fever wild and raucous Billy Bob Thornton…just imagine the wife requirement of that job?

I am borrowing from a Vanity Fair interview that was written in December of 2014.

In that interview it was noted that Vanity Fair had interviewed Jolie 10 years prior and in that interview Jolie was a very different person…

“in those days she talked about sex, about past loves. Today she recites chapter and verse about how to get governments to sit up and acknowledge victims of violence, how to tackle impugnity so that rape is not used as a weapon of war as it so often has been.”

Jolie has done something …through her own sensitive and thoughtful machinations ..that very few people in life come around to doing….and that is to reinvent yourself…..and turn yourself from a person who looked for thin and fleeting pleasures…into a supremely confident and determined advocate for everyone but yourself. She didn’t go the way of Lindsay Lohan…or so many others…she turned virtually all of her energies outward….to others……that is wholly triumphant…especially coming from Hollywood, the magnetic center of hedonism….

“Angelina Jolie is a special envoy of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees.. (U.N.H.C.R.). She traverses the same perilous dirt roads that the relief workers and doctors and foreign correspondents do…In these settings, there are no red carpets, no Donatella Versace gowns. Her job, instead, is to expand the advocacy campaign of U.N.H.C.R and engage in high level mediation in complex emergency situations. It’s a big file as they say in the diplomatic world.

In the past 14 years, beginning as a U.N.H.C.R goodwill ambassador she has gone on more than 50 such missions, which have become a huge part of her life. She sits in refugee camps for hours on the hard ground, notebook in hand. Studying maps and documents, she can pinpoint precisely where Syrian exiles are seeking shelter. She can shift from thinking about ISIS in Iraq to the famine facing South Sudan to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. These regions, over time, have become her turf.

Jolie is no whiner. I’ve been around her on several visits to conflict zones (partly in my capacity as a consultant for the U.N.H.C.R and if there is one thing I’ve noticed is that she has no real diva side. She often arrives at meetings early and sits quietly writing with a book or notes. There is no entourage. She is unfailingly polite and loath to complain about being tired or feeling sick…”

This is a woman who, shortly before that interview had both of her breasts and ovaries removed in a preventive effort given her family history of this type of cancer.….She later published an op-ed piece in the NY times to try and help other women going through a similarly agonizing decision.

“on a personal note, I do not feel any less of a woman”…she wrote. “I feel empowered that I made strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity. This meant something coming, as it did, from one of the worlds sexiest women. It was a defining moment in her public image. If Jolie had ever been a Hollywood wild child this was the official end of it…”

She also has (6) kids…3 biological and 3 adopted from desperate conditions and she and (new) husband Brad Pitt are considering adopting a 7th child from Syria….in 2014 Jolie had just finished directing a logistically challenging feature film that was nominated for several academy awards called “Unbroken”. She is set to direct another film soon starring her husband….

It is humbling to acknowledge that I am not capable of such self sacrifice. I can illuminate it and admire it but I’m sad to say that my well isn’t that deep.…..it’s an extremely high level of commitment that I don’t think I could summon in myself, nor likely will I ever. I am, though, inspired to read about her amazing life and her bountiful compassion and thoughtfulness….her ability to resist the more gratuitous temptations of celebrity that so often engulf so many.

These days….with Angelina,….It’s always about substance and very little about style.

“To whom much is given…much is expected”.

Angelina “gets it”. She is in a place where I could imagine all souls are evolving to arrive; that place where you feel the pain and suffering of others like you would feel your own.

We just aren’t paying close enough attention.