About a year ago, I would’ve called him my guilty pleasure.  Now, I’ll be the very first to admit it: I 100%, wholeheartedly, unapologetically love Justin Bieber. And obviously, I get a lot of slack for this, however I’ve never understood why.

I don’t care what kind of music you listen to, you’d be a liar if you tried to say the kid isn’t talented. He’s not the fifteen year old that sang “One Time” or “One Less Lonely Girl” anymore. 3 full length albums,  and 2 EP’s, and 2 acoustic albums in 4 years, with sales totaling over 12.8 million (just between the full length albums), making over $83 million dollars at one tour, accumulating 3.75 billion views on youtube and 47 million twitter followers, and appearing on the Billboard top 10 fifteen times- that doesn’t come without any talent. Sometimes, I can’t help but think that the only reason people dislike him is because he’s popular.

“But he spits on fans!”

“He peed in a bucket at a restaurant!”

“He had his bodyguards carry him up the Great Wall of China!”

First of all, please do some fact checking before saying this. He didn’t spit on fans, and if you’ve seen the picture of the girls covering their heads that’s supposedly related to this incident, it’s a generic photo probably found on google. Actually, you should probably do some fact checking before saying bad things about anyone. As for the other two- okay, it’s hard to excuse either of those. However, let’s realize how honestly minuscule those two incidents are.  If we’re going to examine every aspect of his life and only nitpick the bad things, let’s look at other glorified celebrities who’s faults often go unmentioned: Lorde, frequently saying bad things about popular musicians (same with Taylor Swift), Lady Gaga not being quite as progressive as she tries to be, and what would any bad celebrity list be without Chris Brown, who was charged with domestic abuse with his girlfriend and still continues to be a successful musician! Not even to mention people like Lindsey Lohan, Amanda Bynes, Britney Spears- you know the type.

Point being: celebrities are human. Sometimes humans aren’t perfect. They make mistakes- sometimes major ones- act like jerks, and make bad choices. I think people tend to forget this.

Now, back to Justin Bieber. Yes, he’s made mistakes. He’s acted like a teenage boy that has too much money for his own good. And due to the fact he is under the watch of the media almost 24/7, we see a lot of these mistakes. However, what we don’t see is the ridiculously long list of good things he’s done.

• He’s granted over 200 wishes via the Make a Wish foundation. Going beyond just meeting these sick children, he’s treated every single child with VIP tickets for their whole family (payed for out of his own pocket), and made generous donations to the charity.
• In 2012, for his 18th birthday, he helped raise almost $50,000 for Charity Water.
• He’s recently teamed up with Pencils for Promise, a non-profit that helps build schools in impoverished countries. He visited Guatemala earlier this month, interacting with local kids and helping build a school. He even gave the shoes off his feet to a child who didn’t have any. When he visited Guatemala in October, he followed up his trip with this video, discussing how it affected him.
• He started the Believe Charity Drive, which donates a portion of his album sales to charity. He’s also involved in numerous other charities.
• Most recently, he visited the disaster-stricken Philippines, and has asked fans to help out by donating. When this trip was reveled- he was quoted saying it was to “bless”, not “impress”, hence why he requested it not be broadcast. He followed up with a tweet that said, “press doesnt want these stories anyway. we do it for the right reasons. but i do hope more people take notice & get involved”.

Now, I could go on for quite a while talking about how much of a big hearted guy he is. Except since I highly doubt anyone feels as passionately as me about this, I’ll stop there.

So, while maybe your music isn’t his taste, at least give the kid a little respect. He definitely deserves it.