grading of death

Article that should alarm as to the way society is changing.

Empathy confronts inertia as all that death takes its toll

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/empathy-confronts-inertia-as-all-that-death-takes-its-toll/2007/04/23/1177180571469.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Polly Toynbee
April 24, 2007

It's been a good week for death. In Iraq, 200 people were blown to bits in what witnesses called "a swimming pool of blood". Remember that the dead are only part of the story: add to this war's hundreds of thousands of civilian corpses all those burned and crippled survivors, breadwinners and babies lost. Few families are untouched by the sheer scale of slaughter.

But it is hard for the media to find new ways to refresh repeat tales of daily carnage. The pictures and the thoughts tell the same story day after day, raising the same terrible questions: what have we unleashed, how can it end? This is our war, our fault, our bloodshed for aiding America's reckless and incompetent invasion and for failing to stop civil war. But because news needs to be new, Iraqi deaths struggle to stay on front pages.

Nor does the war find a place in the nation's top concerns: people worry about terrorist attacks more than the war. Perhaps the public's compassion fatigue is because these deaths are caused mainly by extremist Iraqi sects killing other Iraqis, and many fewer are at the hands of allied soldiers.

Yet more broadly, there is a growing disproportion and incoherence in public attitudes to death, with a curious blend of indifference about deaths that should concern us, prurience about deaths that don't, and a squeamishness and fear verging on denial about mundane dying.

It was a good week for death, too, on the Virginia Tech campus. Although it was hardly less unpredictable "news" than bombs in Baghdad, there was more press relish. (College kids like ours?) But those deaths follow in a cortege of identical tragedies: as soon as we knew this was just another deranged loner, what more was there to think? It happened in Scotland, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Tasmania and elsewhere.

The collective insanity of Americans about guns is an oft-reprised wonderment to non-Americans.

Then there is the apparent double suicide of the two Victorian schoolgirls in an online pact. This combined the addiction of today's youth for forming virtual communities with the nascent voyeurism of many cruising the online world.

Attitudes to death and mourning have grown odder the rarer dying young becomes: there is less sense of proportion about the risks of dying, or about the inevitability of death, even when people die in old age. The temptation is to regard every death as avoidable, deny any accident is ever accidental, always find someone to blame, and hunt down that doctor in charge. At the same time, we dare not face up to the reality of the prolonged agony modern medicine imposes on the dying. Until it happens to them or their parents, people fondly imagine morphine or palliative care will always ease the end. That fallacy means many will enter the grave via the torture chamber, for failure to demand the legal right to die at a time of our own choosing.

People no longer know how to approach death and its rituals. Abandoning religion doesn't necessarily mean resorting to reason. With no hereafter, body parts are gaining morbid significance in a strange new fetishism, for example, TV forensics dramas featuring pathologists weighing brains on scales and disgorging stomach contents in close-up.

Fading cellophane-wrapped flowers tied to lampposts are a drive-slower salutary reminder the roads killed more than 1600 people in Australia a year. The clear and present danger of the car should raise as much or more public fear than panic over very rare deaths by terrorism. The anxious taste for daily health scares when we have never been healthier or safer is another necro-neurosis.

The real objection is not aesthetic, or distaste for emotional ostentation. It is about a sense of proportion over fear and death. An age of over-individualism is demanding individual recognition for every painful death, me-me mourning regardless of its collective significance. Near-pornographic fascination with the gory details of a meaningless madman's murders in Virginia was just grisly. The past week's deaths in Iraq are the ones we should all be contemplating with due solemnity, because they belong to us.

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