On the weekend of July 22nd 2011, the San Diego Comic Con raged on in a storm of film, comics, video games, superheroes and celebrities. The convention has become one of the biggest spectacles in all of entertainment, but remains a communal celebration of dragging out that costumed skeleton in the closet. For those interested in both entertainment and world news, the weekend brought a macabre dichotomy.
In Norway, Anders Behring Breivik expressed his political displeasure by murdering about 100 Norwegians at a Labor Party rally . At the same time, pop music icon Amy Winehouse passed away at the iconic age of 27 and under the radar many Chinese civilians died in a train crash. In the social internet soup, most focused on the death of Winehouse and the Norwegians, with two polarizing sentiments emerging.
A) It’s acceptable to feel compassion for the tragedy in Norway, but the case of Winehouse must be met with less sympathy.
B) Death is death and sad is sad. We shouldn’t prioritize our mourning according to moral scale.
These two differing ideas present a conflict of personal and societal morality. On the societal side, there is an unquestionable difference between the two incidents. One is murder and the other is a prolonged suicide. To deepen the chasm between the two issues, the murder is a massacre, rather than a personal crime of passion open to the debate of causality. Breivik killed innocent people. Being complicit in her own death by engaging in a publicized lifestyle of substance abuse, Miss Winehouse is not an innocent where her death is concerned.
Developed western society’s stance is clear, but our laws are a result of our morality and the reverse shouldn’t be true. There should be an empirical morality divorced from the law or conventions of a community. The shift has to be in perspective. The law looks at the result of an incident and tries very hard not to be bothered by circumstance or motivation. We have no such luxury, as our lives are a shared soup of circumstance and motivation. We can’t divorce ourselves from that responsibility and still expect to maintain a reasonable position from which to judge, because lack of participation disqualifies us from the panel.
At the outset, we must acknowledge that Amy Winehouse did not live and die in a vacuum. Her world of rock stars, paparazzi, celebrity and pop music is the same world we live in. There is a prevailing sentiment that if you live a certain life, you are not allowed sadness and depression. The ignorance of that thought cannot bear its own weight; that’s now how depression works. Moreover, the very thought contains the lie that leads many to misery:
All you need is to get rich and/or popular, and you’ll be happy.
Miss Winehouse found out this wasn’t true and for her own reasons could not see herself as a person worthy of happiness. This low self image resulted in self destruction, but the blast radius was contained to one. In others, this low self image manifests in other ways. People become empowered by predator dogmas built to feed on a mind drowning in isolation or oppression.
Self empowerment becomes attainable by the destruction of others.
Our participation in the world doesn’t make us responsible for it’s current construction. There aren’t too many of us who poured Amy a drink or sold Anders his guns, but if you’ve blogged, tweeted or message-boarded in our acidic culture, you’ve seasoned and tasted the soup. There is an imbalance of mechanisms that succeed off of our weaknesses compared to those that encourage our strengths. From our governments on down to our YouTube comments, we largely focus on the negative and are content to vent at one another rather than problem solve, yet problems cause the aberrant behaviors we post about.
Feeling sad or deciding which death is more tragic does very little to make things better. Instead, the moral answer is to analyze our participation in a culture that makes it so easy for young people to view personal happiness as a fantasy. How much of our personal interactions are dedicated to finding a communal ideal and carving a path towards it? Does happiness have an acceptable definition in western developed society?
It’s one thing for a young person to not do what they should be doing, but it’s another when society doesn’t even tell them what that is. Our empirical morality has been an absentee father and they deserve better. All of them.
--NB2
