It’s deja vu, of course.

Another celebrity, another fly-over, another agenda, another drive-by assassination attempt on the industry that fuels my community.

And thousands of words written and spoken and tweeted and Facebook posted and blogged, filled with outrage and anger, and in the end, what happens?

Nothing.

Nothing changes, as it’s a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, just as it always is when celebrities decide to visit my community and express their “deep concern” over our industry.

It’s a vicious cycle, as they drop in, they stir up the hornet nest, the media reports, the locals go into defensive hyper-drive and then they fly away, never to be seen again in our community, and life?

Well, life goes on, theirs and ours.

Why do we allow them to do this to us time and time again? Why do we even dignify their visits with our outrage and our anger and our time and our emotions?

My chosen response is now this:

Dear X,

Thanks for visiting.

The end.

It’s all they deserve, no matter the song titles or movie credits attached to their name. They don’t deserve our ink, our words or our emotions, because frankly, we have other needs for those right now, like helping our community to rebuild and recover.

And in the future, they will come and they will go, their little journeys into the heart of our community driven by their own agendas and egos and money and whatever it is that motivates them to come here; and at the end of every single visit exactly one thing will have changed:

Nothing.

And if each of these visits results in exactly nothing, what should we be giving them in return?

Well, nothing. It seems like a fair exchange, really. Let them go through the effort of coming here, expressing their “concerns” and repay their efforts with absolute, complete and resolute indifference.

Because I suspect nothing is more infuriating than when their status is met with a total lack of response, and what they think is met with utter indifference because we know, with certainty, that it just does not and will not matter, not tomorrow, not today and not ever.

So yeah, thanks for visiting.

The end.