People Die and it's Really Sad

Once after the death of some famous person or other, a man on the bus asked me what I thought of the Great Tragedy.

Recognizing that what most people mean by "Tragedy" is "Something Deplorable, Wretched, or Really, Really Sad," I asked the man what made the famous person's death more tragic than the millions of other deaths happening all the time.

Well, he said, He died So Young.

Yes? Most human beings die in childhood, many from diarrhea. What makes the death of this famous person so much more grief-worthy than all those other deaths?

But he was So Young and So Talented.

Okay, he was talented. What of all the other talented people we've never heard about who die young? Children whose families couldn't afford the training needed to make use of their talents? Children whose cultures told them it was wrong to do what they wanted to do? Children whose families told them they were worthless, children who grew up believing it? Don't they deserve to be mourned as much as, or more than, this man who had at least had the opportunity to make some use of his gifts? What makes the famous person's death a Great Tragedy while those other deaths are just numbers we never think about unless we have to?

As I spoke, the eyes of the man I was speaking with grew wider and wider and wider until finally words burst from his lips to the effect that I have a Really Unique Perspective and should become a newspaper columnist or something.

::sigh::

(no subject)

The last few years of my father's life, all my arguments with him seemed to end the same way.

Dad (melodramatically): Is that any way to Honor Thy Father?

Me: Of course it is! My father always taught me to question authority.

Dad: Oh yeah, I did. What'd I have to go and do that for? That was dumb.

~~~~~

I sometimes wish I could be the kind of person who would blindly accept what they were told rather than questioning everything. Life seems so much easier for people who know without having to think. When I was in college, I actually yelled at my father once, "WHY did you make it impossible for me to just believe what people tell me?" The people who always bought the party line, the various flavors of fundamentalist, the people who believed their professors were infallible, even members of scary freaky religious cults all seemed to be happier than I was. In the face of my anger at the unfairness of it all, my father seemed almost contrite.

~~~~~

Today I was reading something that made me scream "NO! NO! NO!" with every cell of my being. I'm so unaccustomed to certainty, I keep wondering if I rejected what I read not because I believe it to be untrue but because I'm afraid that it could be true.

You know, if I hadn't had to ask so many questions all the time, I'd probably have gotten more dates in college.