[quote]countingbeans wrote:
Clipped from a much longer blog post:
[i]His first few remarks about it were a very fair criticism of the media’s maudlin celebration of him, and heaping praise and sympathy on him.
Why is that a problem?
Well, think about it: There are tens of thousands of suicidal people in the world at any moment. What is the Very Last Thing you could possibly want to say to such a person?
That you’ll be praised as a wonderful human being who just felt the pain of the world too intensely, and that your decision to take your own life (leaving behind emotionally-slain children!!!) is completely understandable and even, if not quite justifiable, certainly deserving of sympathetic respect.
The problem with giving this sort of adulation to a suicide is not because we don’t want to praise the person who killed himself.
The problem is that we don’t wish to suggest to the tens of thousands of still-living potential suicides that we support them in their decision.
This is a dicey thing. On one hand, we do not wish to sound callous about someone who, reportedly and very plausibly, lived a less-than-happy life due to clinical depression. Our hearts go out to such persons-- as they go out to anyone living his life with a serious burden.
But on the other hand, we must not be so praiseworthy as to give encouragement to other people currently living right on the edge!
Limbaugh noted, quite properly, this tension, this ambiguity. How should we talk about suicides?
To call them “cowards” – as Shep Smith did – is to be cruel to they themselves (though, being dead, they can hardly feel the sting of the epithet), and yet it is also to be kind to those who have suicidal thoughts, and more importantly, to the families of those having suicidal thoughts.
We do not wish to put those families through the living nightmare of a suicide. For the rest of their lives, they will wonder: “What did I miss? Could I have done more? Was it all my fault?”
A suicide is actually a murder in which the killer makes his own family and close friends self-suspected conspirators in the murder for the rest of their lives.
So yes, we do wish to exhibit normal human sympathy for the dead.
But on the other hand, we do not want to encourage more people to kill themselves, thereby put more innocent victims (such as Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda) through the never-ending pain of always wondering, “Was I actually responsible for my father’s self-murder?”
It’s tricky, and people come down on this in different ways.
Limbaugh found that the media was being too praiseworthy of Williams, too understanding, and thus, with every good intention in the world, they wind up giving the signal that it’s really okay to kill yourself, if that’s where your demons drive you.
Do they intend that? Of course not! They intend nothing so terrible as that. But this is the natural consequence of being too effusive about a suicide.
As I said, it’s Tricky.
Sometimes by being cruel, you wind up being kind.
And sometimes by being kind, you wind up being cruel.[/i]
-Ace of Spades
I guess Ace has some growin’ up to do, eh?
[/quote]
Yeah, he does.
There is a fundamental difference between the avoidance of suicide’s glorification and the calling of a suicide a selfish coward.
Also–and this seems not to matter to a troubling number of intelligent people–suicide brought on by clinical depression, which has absolutely not been ruled out in the present case, is not compatible with juvenile and prickish value judgements like “selfish coward.” Think about what human organ gives rise to an act of cowardice, and then think about what clinical depression does, by its very definition, to that same human organ.
Edited