(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.

[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.

[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]

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."

[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.

[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]

Thank you for that and fwiw I wasn't offended and am not angry. Just really touchy about anyone Going There, you know?

ETA: Though do give some thought as to how and why you got from "why have people apparently completely forgotten how to act in the face of tragedy and death" to "But POL POT!" in one step?

Whataboutery is bad for the general discourse and for the blood pressure, both.

[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. :(

[legionseagle]

Quite apart from anything else, the loss of a ship (whether or not accompanied by loss of life, though the latter makes it infinitely worse) is always a tragedy because of all the hopes, memories and fears she carries with her. I've seen a tough Northern biker lad in tears at the loss of the yacht who'd seen him safely through Biscay, notwithstanding performing a 360 degree roll there, in harbour when a wall collapsed in Tenerife.

[legionseagle]

You could always try the all-purpose, "Let's not try second-guessing MAIB, shall we?"

I was reminded, coincidentally, that there are circumstances when not dying is far worse for the reputation in the long run: Mark Litchfield and Bruce Ismay are names that spring to mind.

[pantryslut]

Oh yeah, that! I'm still at the stage of staggering around going "wait, I know that guy in yellow" in this particular case and I haven't worked my way through it yet to want to bite people's heads off. But it's coming.

[tree_and_leaf]

What the actual fuck?

[commodorified]

I think I'm past that and already to the even more general-purpose WHAT DID YOU SAY?

Your answer is better, I just can't quite manage it atm.

[commodorified]

I have noticed also that the same people who rant long, bitterly, and frequently on inaccurate data about The Nanny State and Everything Being Too Safe are EXACTY the lot who show up to loudly argue that people who take a chance and lose were a blot on the gene pool and their families ought to be sent to workhouses to pay off the Search and Rescue bill.

I despair. I know we can't afford despair, but sometimes.

[legionseagle]

I have literally never heard anything more disgusting than the public debate which took place in Australia after the rescue of Isabelle Autissier in the Southern Ocean along those lines. It's one of the numerous things I have against the country.

[clanwilliam]

*That's* what triggered the post? Oh sweet merciful Cthulhu, some people just make me sick.

[legionseagle]

Have you noticed, it's always worse when there's a woman among the casualties?

[commodorified]

*eeyore face*

[wordweaverlynn]

One thing that has bothered me in this particular case is that ALL the people whom I heard responding to the news by saying, "Idiots shouldn't have been out in that storm," were immediately saddened when told that the Bounty was also the ship from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Lives don't count. Movies do.