smokingboot

Reading reactions across the net to the assassination of Brian Thompson. Bloody hell.

I don't know enough about US Health care to comment on medical insurance and how that works. Personally I'm a believer in healthcare free at the point of use, paid for out of general taxation and national insurance. This can be no surprise given where I live.

Can't realistically comment on a way of life I haven't experienced, but when I think of the worst people in my life, the folk who've done me the most wrong and really hurt or harmed me, I cannot name a single person I would want to see ended by a bullet. There's no-one whose violent death would make me happy. Maybe that's the privilege of a fortunate child.

Someone writes '...If people don't want their death celebrated, they should be better people when they're alive,' I almost asked if they thought Brian Thompson currently cares whether or not his death is celebrated. His kids might be suffering of course, but if that in itself is a cause for celebration, if evil is a thing one becomes by proxy, the angrily joyful stranger is in as much danger as said family. And what makes one a better person than Brian Thompson? I suspect rejoicing on the internet at murder isn't exactly a great indicator.

I recall our Cambodian guide telling us about how folk got past the national horror, and wondered then if this sense of forgiveness, of letting the terrible memories slide downstream, was a way of blanking out a mass trauma. Now I think it is a decision to work, a dedication to make things better. Quite hard I imagine.

'Buddha says not to take revenge,' I can hear his voice and see him smile as he spread his hands out under the flowering bodhi tree. 'Now most Cambodians think they are in paradise.'

But if Paradise waits under a tree in Cambodia, and Death stalks a hotel in Manhattan, Dante knew the landscapes of the internet 700 years before anyone else:

A marsh it makes, which has the name of Styx,
This tristful brooklet, when it has descended
Down to the foot of the malign gray shores.

And I, who stood intent upon beholding,
Saw people mud-besprent in that lagoon,
All of them naked and with angry look.

They smote each other not alone with hands,
But with the head and with the breast and feet,
Tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth.