| Author | Message | ||
     Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.132.169.240 |
Last night, before going to bed, I heard this; http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20069846-504083.html Today, I find this; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/us/08graves.html?_r=1 I must be sick because I was faintly disappointed at this last one. | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
I saw this story being announced on BBC News 24 when I got in last night and the poor girl actually sounded a bit distressed reading it out. Thank God it proved to be a hoax! | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
You mean she wasn't really distressed? What a mean trick! | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Perhaps the most disturbing thing is I kind of shrugged and thought, 'another infamous serial killer for the record books', then went to bed. This mass grave that never was should be seen as a good news story, for a change, and I'm thankful for that. | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
All true, Stevie. However... I'm wondering something. Is it possible for us ever to be really shocked by the deaths of people whose existence we weren't even aware of until they died? I say this because when I was in Spain a few years ago, my girlfriend and myself were driving along a road and saw the body of a motorcyclist who had been hit by a car. The paramedics were there and had just covered him with a white sheet (which quickly turned red). My girlfriend was so shaken up that she insisted that we stop at the next village. It wasn't the sight of the body that had upset her; it was the idea that some children somewhere might have been deprived of a father, that some wife had lost a husband, etc. In other words she was empathising. I felt nothing much and she berated me for my seeming callousness. It's not that I couldn't feel anything for someone I didn't know; but that I can't feel something for someone who never existed (for me) until they had already stopped existing. So to be honest, I don't think your thought was disturbing. I wouldn't have cared much about this mass grave story either. I might have worried about future potential victims if a killer was loose, but not about dead people so unknown to me that they didn't exist in any meaningful terms. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
Death is natural and inevitable, so it's probably irrational to be really distressed at the simple fact of mortality. But knowing the person who has died is not the only route to being disturbed and saddened by a death. Violent deaths are distressing in themselves. Civilian massacres and natural disasters provoke strong reactions across the world. If that were not the case, we would lack a moral compass in relation to human rights and human needs. The murderous persecution of a minority involves systematically making them invisible to the rest of the population, so that they shift from being 'people we haven't met' to being 'people we don't know', then 'people we wouldn't want to know', then 'unknown and therefore probably dangerous' and finally 'not people at all'. The question that occurred to me in relation to this story was that if the police want to prosecute the 'spirit medium' who told them about the mass grave, what is the basis of the prosecution? That she pretended to have had a vision? How could that be proved? If she had a vision of something not real, how is that either unusual or a crime? Does it make her a 'fake' medium or just an unlucky one? Whose fault is it that her 'vision' was taken so literally? | ||
| Stevie Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Ever read 'The Death Of Grass', Joel? I'm half way through it and the main horror of that novel is the convincing way it describes the gradual unravelling of stiff-upper-lip Britishness and concern for the dying millions overseas once the reality of the crop virus hits home and people are forced to put their own country first, and finally themselves and their loved ones above the survival of even their closest neighbours. One of the characters turns from being a mild-mannered English shopkeeper, who wouldn't hurt a fly, into a cold-eyed suvivalist, in the Heinlein mould, willing to cheat, rob or kill anyone to ensure his family's survival. He comes out with the most memorable quote in the novel to date: "All men are friends by convenience and enemies by choice." And he is one of the more admirable characters in the book! Human nature is in a constant battle with itself to avoid being dragged back into the morass of "dog-eat-dog" survival of the fittest but it has to remain convenient for us to be able to fight that fight. Looking at the News headlines of today, and feeling the pinch in our pockets while supermarket prices go through the roof and civil unrest spreads throughout the globe, it is all too easy to imagine John Christopher's prophecy as already in the first stages of coming true. If so I fear human rights will be one of the first casualties. Scary times. |