(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

[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.

[commodorified]

Well, and there have been so many cases of "oho look at this moron" where if one keeps asking questions it turns out that there was More To It. But "basically bright person has rotten luck, dies due to shortcut 1000 people get away with every day" isn't a story.

But mostly it's just, God, how did this ever get to be socially acceptable behaviour, this thing where people react to a death by demanding all the details and arguing over who's fault it was?

It's just appalling and I hearby vow to stop letting people do it in front of me.