RE: Death Celebration?
I wrote in a previous post about the outpouring of joy at the death of Jerry Falwell not to long ago. My point in that post, if I had one, was that I didn't personally see that as being a good thing to become comfortable with doing. V., whose excellent blog I have a link to on my sidebar, resent me an email discussion I had with her when President Reagan died, and the similarities between my post and that email are pretty striking, and it appears that I had much the same problem then as I did recently with Falwell's death.
However, what caused me to revisit this was not only rereading that email exchange, but also a conversation I had with a coworker regarding the same issue. It was pointed out to me that unless you had to live under the persecution that Falwell and his ilk advocated, then it's hard to really gauge what type of reaction one would have to such a person's death. I guess the adage about walking in one's shoes is truer in this regard than I had thought.
On the other hand, though, there's also the issue of whether or not you're sinking to the level of that which you feel persecuted by when you engage in a celebration of their death. Isn't that the point when someone tells you that if you do such and such, then that person has won? I'm not really advocating one side or another here, but I find it interesting to think about the fact that certain things that would seem to be questionable in one context aren't in another.
3 comments:
I understand your coworker's point, but to me, there is still a difference between a reaction and a response. You can react to someone's death by feeling just about anything, but to respond to it by dancing in the streets or strapping on bombs is another matter entirely. Public figures know they'll get public responses for better or worse, so maybe the line is harder to spot in some examples, but I still believe there are rights and wrongs regardless of whether the persecution had been personal. Again, while I get what your coworker's saying, to me it remains more a question of character than context. --v.
P.S.) Hey, you spelled his name right this time around. :) --v.
I certainly agree with you in all of your points. I think what has happened is that our culture has become a little too comfortable with being so lackadaisical when considering such heated topics like death. What I find interesting is that it's not confined to any specific political slant. You can find people being disrespectful, the term I'd use, to the dead on both sides of the aisle. The reactions to Falwell and Reagan on the left are counterbalanced by similar responses on the right to figures like Kurt Cobain or Ann Coulter's hideous remarks regarding 9/11 victims and their families, although that's more of a case of disrespect by association than actually desecrating the dead. I like your idea of reaction versus response and character and context.
Finally, I get the man's name right! :)
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