The Only Good Thing To Come From #EricTheActor's Death

Over the weekend, beloved Wack Packer & everyone's favorite pain in the ass Eric "The Actor" Lynch passed away tragically & unexpectedly (well, as much as someone who wasn't supposed to live past his teens is; he was 39).  As a hard core Howard Stern show fan, I can say the news was meet with the usual celebrity death is:  complete & utter denial ("please let this be the greatest hoax ever");  general grief ("he'll never call in & totally kill the whole momentum of the show ever again"); & finally, #Jordanshrug acceptance ("Hope you're at peace, Eric, nobody deserves it more").

But I took a little lesson from seeing all the pop media coverage of his death & seeing him top trending on Sunday during a highly anticipated televised Super Bowl rematch:  it's complete possible for we as a society to change our dated behavior,  even low life Stern fans like me.  See, for years, Eric was known only as "Eric The Midget", very much to his own chagrin.   No matter matter how insensitive this could seen (but probably because of how insensitive it seemed to him), that was the only name he would be identified with as far as the radio show & the fans were concerned.  The title "The Actor" was something suggested by him;  an obvious reflection of his delusional self-awareness.   I can't seem to recall exactly what the setup was, where in one of the conditions Howard pledged to finally stop referring to Eric by the Midget moniker & start using the Actor one, but all I know is as hard as it was to break the years-long habit, Howard was true to his word & changed his identification of Eric (most likely, Eric completely & totally reneged on whatever he was supposed to do & probably at the last minute.....man, I already miss the dude). 

Without everybody consciously realizing it, the effect slowly set in & he became Eric The Actor without anybody missing his old name.  It helped that a majority of the relentless ribbing of him didn't come from hateful humor of his condition, but from his uncanny ability to make everyone forget about it & still recognize what an asshole he was (or as he would claim " just the character he was playing";  nobody could be that good without there being some truth to it).  With just the slightest of light influence, change can occur.  It's not some impossible dream, nor does it have to be painful.  It's probably also an asset that the daily search of the Internet to find somebody expressing anything that can be interpreted in a politically incorrect way seems to never hit anything Howard Stern related;  if there was a Eric The Midget slip here or there, it wasn't immediately attacked as a form of regression.  If only all of us real human beings could be forgiven so easily.

 RIP Eric The Actor...thanks for the laughs