(no subject)

[commodorified]

So, seriously, when did it start to be socially acceptable and even normal to greet the news of someone's death by convening an inquiry on the spot to decide whether they "deserve" sympathy or not?

Ok, actually, forget that question. how do we make it stop?

Comments

[staranise]

WORD. Let's reset our defaults to "the loss of human life is always a tragedy (though some tragedies are that the person did not live that well)." Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

That said, sometimes if I hear a friend or acquaintance's family member has died, I may ask whether condolences are in order, but that just says something about the circles I move in and the general prevalence of abuse survivors in them.

[commodorified]

If I'm not sure I often say "how are you holding up?", because the death of an abuser is often the loss of the chance, real or imagined, to make it all come out differently, you know?

Usually people save the real vileness for deaths of strangers reported in the media, and general classes like suicides or climbers or divers or whatever.

I feel like there needs to be a concerted effort to shame and humiliate people who loudly announce their lack of sympathy for the recently dead.

[staranise]

Social rituals around death baffle and enrage me sometimes--especially when I'm "bereaved" of someone I'm still angry at and don't miss at all. (Grandpa's funeral was weird.) There is definitely a mourning process that happens, but my brain shorts out when I'm supposed to plug it into a social interface.

What bothers me about the media--and social networking especially--is that peoples' lives are right there under your nose, conveying a false sense of immediacy--but at the same time they stop being people because there are so many nameless, distant folks out there. So it's so easy to say something absolutely stupid that gets back to people for whom it is personal, and hurts them.

[sara]

I often resort to, "Oh dear, it's always so hard," myself. Which leaves the question of what, exactly, is hard up to the hearer, and is almost invariably true.

And yes, even if someone has died in a particularly stupid way (we had a report in the paper this morning of a local gentleman who died in a household plumbing accident, which...takes real doing, poor bastard) it's not like that's a net good for the world.

[kindkit]

Hmmm, I think there's lot of difference between expressed lack of sympathy for someone who was personally harmless but died because of their own error (e.g. a climber or your example below of the person who had a plumbing accident) and for someone who did notable harm. I was disgusted at the outpouring of nil nisi bonum platitudes in the US when Richard Nixon died, for example, and I'm not sure that the death of a Pol Pot calls for anyone's sympathy. Similarly, to use a non-political example, I was a bit shocked when, after Michael Jackson's death, some people reacted with outrage to any mention of the child molestation accusations against him, on the grounds that he was dead now and you don't say mean things about dead people.

[aris_tgd]

Oh dear blessed typewriters, didn't she just ask you to stop?

[commodorified]

Merci, mon ami. Had I known you were coming, I'd have saved myself a longish comment.

[kindkit]

. . . I interpreted the post and subsequent comments as allowing for discussion.

commodorified, if I was wrong about that and have offended you, I apologize.

[commodorified]

1) I thought it was really really obvious that I was talking about a) not b).

2) More like 'arguably by their own fault' - the world is full of people who will cheerfully - literally - tell you all about deaths that take place in the course of activities they do not themselves understand.

3a) Had Nixon died in a horrible accident I wouldn't have mourned him, but I wouldn't have gone around announcing that anyone who does X activity deserves what they get, either.

3b) Actually, having cheerfully excoriated Nixon, frex, up one side and down the other for *years*, I was okay with taking a few days off so his friends and family could bury him. If someone is genuinely vile, there's relatively little chance they're gong to completely rehabilitate themselves by kicking the bucket. I don't much go for nil nisi bonum</>, but that ought properly to apply to serious evaluations of a person's legacy, not games of "let's make the mourners feel even WORSE."

[kindkit]

Sorry, I mistook your meaning and responded in a way that offended you. I apologize.

[pantryslut]

Funny you should bring this up this week, she said cryptically. And I agree.

[commodorified]

Slab-sided motherfucking dry-land commodores, she said not at all cryptically.

I swear, though, it's getting so there are no unsuitable weeks to mention it. :(

[tree_and_leaf]

What the actual fuck?

[commodorified]

*eeyore face*

[thnidu]

Me, too. Near as I can tell, the immediate spur was reactions to the loss of the Bounty.

[wordweaverlynn]

Slut-shaming is passe. Now we go in for corpse-shaming.

[taelle]

*googling up the reason* Ow. I haven't heard about it. They must have loved this ship a lot...

[fajrdrako]

Eeyew. Who said that? About whom? Really, it isn't a question of deserving, and who are we to judge?

Everyone dies. Deserving has nothing to do with it.

[mme_hardy]

I agree. It is absolutely disgusting. It routinely shows up in obituaries now -- "X, a lifelong nonsmoker, died of lung cancer" and "Y, an avid runner, died of heart disease" -- I assume to preempt the "They brought it on themselves". I am noticing how often I do this reflexively; I am trying very hard to stomp this reaction. I just found the term for it today: just-world phenomenon.

[legionseagle]

It's been going a long time on the smoking side; a schoolfriend's father died of lung cancer in 1978 or thereabouts and she found the "It's very sad but he shouldn't have smoked" "Actually, he DIDN'T" exchanges a particularly distressing part of the process, but at least better than what she presumed she'd have had to put up with if he had.

[ironed_orchid]

Just World people are right up there with all the other magical thinkers. The idea that things just happen sometimes seems to have completely passed them by.

[welcomingsong]

Seriously. I just saw another unrelated one. The complete and utter absence of any appearance of compassion is, to me at least, heart-wrenching.

[fallconsmate]

my first response was "how sad about the ship" then "OMG what a tragedy for the families!"

ship, historical value, of course.
human lives, irreplacible.

and yes, ships out to see in a LOT of cases are safer than in harbor (says the daughter of a Navy vetran). but not *always*. its still a terrible tragedy for lives being lost for *any* reason shy of "hey y'all look at this" accidents, and even then, the families miss their relatives.

[amberfox]

Yeah, mine went roughly, "Oh, that's awful, those poor people" to "Oh no, that ship's historic" to "Dear god I love the USCG" in a matter of seconds. (If you haven't seen it, at least part of the footage from the rescue is on YouTube; apparently their helicopters are equipped with automatic recording devices.)

Um.... what? Hmmm... huh? .... Oh.... maybe.... Aha.

[thnidu]

I just reread this comment after posting it; and I must add here, up top, that Yes, goddammit, you are 100% right about that kind of reaction.

---

With respect to I thought it was really really obvious that I was talking about a) not b).:

When I got to that line, reading down this page for the first time just now, I looked back up for a) and b), and didn't find them. And it was really really nonobvious to me what in the world you were talking about, if anything, besides the important but totally nonspecific things you said in the post itself.

It was not until the first mention of "ship" that I began to suspect you might be talking about the Bounty. That was in legionseagle's comment 3a1, the 15th comment at this moment, plus the post itself.

clanwilliam@3a4 seems to have gotten it only about then... but honestly, commodorified, "dry-land commodores" really, really wasn't obvious to me. I guess I don't think about commodores, real or self-deluded, as much as you do. I wasn't sure I had it till wordweaverlynn finally spoke the True Name (was it tabu after her sinking?) in 3a5 (twenty-eighth down the page).