Obviously anyone’s death is tragic.
However if you’re say, over the age of 15, and you become physically emotional (i.e. sobbing, can’t sleep etc.) over the death of someone who you never, EVER, had any personal contact or association with, then there is something wrong with you.
I disagree.
What about people who were depressed over the Kennedy Assasination, or the murder of John Lennon?
What about fictional characters that are only a few scribblings on a piece of paper?
IMHO one has to be deeply insecure to declare anything they don’t understand wrong. Or maybe just very close minded.
Well, your question was answered in the OP:
I think it’s pretty clear. Look, I’m sorry she died and all, but do you go into mourning every time a human dies? That must be one heck of a full-time job, considering somebody is dying about every minute. Life is full of enough crap without piling artificial sentimentality on top of it.
[out of the loop, checking in]
So, this is a singer who was killed in a plane crash?
http://news.excite.com/news/r/010828/18/news-crash-bahamas-aaliyah-dc
Is this the same topic as the “Buckley” thread, namely, “why do people get so upset when celebrities, whom they have never met, die?”
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=83954
Well, to address the OP (the thread title, at least), no, it’s not “Princess Di all over again”, because even those of us who are chronically out of the loop heard about it when SHE died.
And I was once personally acquainted with a dear, sweet 14-year-old, the daughter of a friend of mine, who came out of the first-run release of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan weeping helplessly. “What’s wrong?” her mother asked in alarm. “Spock dies,” Lizzie told us briefly, and she cried all the way home.
Go figure. [shrug]
But come on, It’s Mr. Spock! 
Hail Ants
Come on, I cry at movies, and you say that somebody * must* be a total washover if they cry when someone dies who actually happens to be real. At least they still have their priorities in check. Besides, who are you to judge someone who acts on their feelings and is in touch with their human condition.
Remember, human beings do develop deep emotional bonds with people or even things all the time and can relate to the feelings that her family and friends must be feeling at this time. Have you no respect for people that can recognize when a good, honest person has been taken from this earth without their emotional consent, and as a result are promoted to tears(remember that tears for most people are a rare condition that should be not necessarily relished, but experienced), and experience is knowledge. They are necessary, and that is why they happen. I acknowledge that it is rare when a truly loveable and chaste person leaves our earth, and that is why some people feel so cheated(consciously or not) when they are taken away.
Don’t take this as a brash assumption about your emotional maturity, but I think you just havn’t had a close friend, or someone you felt really close to, die. It hits you like a ton of bricks and crying is completely, 100% beyond your control. FYI, some artists are real artists, which means that they put their heart and soul into their work, like Aaliyah. Some people, those whom you have so boldly chastised, feel that they really connected with Aaliyah, like they were friends. Just because you don’t(didn’t?) have compassion for those who truly delve into their emotions doesn’t mean that you have to be an asshole(am I wrong?) and call them a bunch of crying babies. Have a heart, man. Let people feel what they want to feel.
Whether you experience some sort of emotional transformation after reading this is beyond the limits of my control, but I would like to impress upon you that until you have been privy to a wider spectrum of the emotions characteristic to the human experience, and make judgements upon those who have, I think you are simply making tactless remarks to preserve an illusion of security that will hopefully be admonished through your natural{again, *hopefully) maturing processes.
Read it twice if you didn’t get the gist on the first go-around.
BTW, why the hell is this in GD?
If someone cries because of someone else’s death, why should anyone else care? What if I cry for no reason at all? How pathetic am I…
By the way my signature is only a quote from the animated TV show “King of the Hill”, and the character who said it was referring to someone he actually knew (if animated TV characters can know each other)…
I was all ready to jump into this thread and say something about how ludricous our attachment to pop figures is.
Now that I’ve read the posts I have been given food for thought.
I go to movies. I love movies. I become involved and care deeply about fictional character’s lives for a couple of hours or so. I worry for the twists of fate they suffer. I weep for their outcome. Am I coo-coo? Nah. The screenwright just did a good job, that’s all.
So now, when a real person dies, how do I feel? Well, if it’s Aaliyah, not much. That’s only because I didn’t know her. I can think of a number of other musicians, Kurt Cobain and Stevie Ray Vaughan jump to mind, whose death affected me. I didn’t know them personally. They didn’t call. They never came over for dinner at the house. But their music made a connection with me and I miss that connection.
So, more power to ya, if you miss her. It means you’re human. It means you’re still alive to miss her.
I am certainly not a weepy person, but I teared up when Gilda Radner and Divine and Richard Amsel and Cass Elliott died, because I enjoyed their talents and thought it was a shame that they wouldn’t be contributing any more to the world. Aside from the sadness of relatively young people dying in the first place.
I’d never heard of Aaliyah and didn’t cry when she died—but it is an awful shame that someone 22 years old was cut off from what seems to have been a very promising career. Plus, she seems to have been a good role model for poor inner-city kids, judging from the news interviews I saw last night.
If I weren’t such a tough, manly bastard, I would admit to tearing up when Eponine dies in Les Mis, just before the Phantom lets Christine go, and when Kim dies in Miss Saigon.
Question: does the OP therefore consider there to be something wrong with me? (Er… if I did admit it, that is?) 
Or Martin Luther King, Jr. I’m sure there were plenty of people who cried and probably felt depressed when he was killed-same with Ghandi.
I agree that the media tends to blow the importance of these celebrities way out of proportion, and to depict them in an artificially glorified manner. And people who buy into this are being irrational to some degree - or at least misled. But I don’t agree that such people have any emotional problem at all.
I think this is getting into a male/female (AKA Mars/Venus) debate. Women are supporting the right to cry whenever they feel like it and the men are arguing that it is inconceivable to them how people can become so emotionally attached to someone they never met. How many times have you been to a “chick flick” (I am going to get abused for that one) and see/hear women crying and you know most of the men wondering why the hell they are crying and when the hell is the movie going to end.
While I was saddened by the deaths of Lennon, Phil Hartman, (list is long and morbid) etc., I (being male) never felt the emotional bond between us (the audience) and them (the public figures). I never felt the need to cry of their deaths.
However, when my uncle past away a few years ago I did feel the emotional bond between us. I was brought to tears.
Of course, I am only generalizing the male/female emotional diferences.
There were eight other people in that plane… why a special pedestal for Aaliyah? I can’t, off the top of my head, think of anybody (that I’m not personally connected with) who’s death would provoke a reaction other than “what a shame” or “how unfortunate for his/her loved ones”. Carl Sagan was the last famous figure to die that had any impact on me, and my heart sank a little just because I thought of the loss to scociety as a whole.
Maybe it’s just my coping mechanism, or that I thought Aaliyah didn’t have much to contibute to scociety as a whole (any more than the other 8 people who died on that plane).
Attryant:
Mass media gives some people the impression that they truly know a given celebrity, and therefore feel empathy for their trageties.
The other people on that plane weren’t known, but that doesn’t trivialize their deaths… it just overshadows them.
coughDale Earnhardtcough
Sorry, Dale Earnhardt didn’t affect me one bit. But I see your point about grown men crying over his death. Well taken. I bet they cried when Old Yella died too.
Is that the episode where Buckley’s angel appears to LuAnne on the trampoline? I thought that entire episode was so awesome and well-done.
Back to the subject. . .
Personally, I wish all celebrity deaths were covered by the media the same way Aaliyah’s death has been; the major news networks and papers did a mention of it, and the networks she mattered to her more (MTV) did a fairly classy little bio and tribute to her, showing parts of shows she did, talking to fans, and so on. There’s no big drama, no crazy overdone news coverage, no matrying of her. I think it’s very classy.
Unfortunatly, anyone more famous than her has the potential to have their death (and life) totally overblown in the media.
I usually don’t get that torn-up by celebrity deaths (although I did cry over Phil Hartman, but that’s because I felt so sad for his children), but I did real saddened by Aaliyah’s death. She was only 22 years old. That’s very close to my age, and really young.