I find displays of public grief really.. repulsive. I'm not sure what about it affect me so, but it seems disgusting to me.
The past few weeks the news has been saturated with school shootings, kidnappings and murders, criscrossing the country from Montreal to Kansas - uniting people in their gaudy grief. It seems like barely hours go by when the flowers and teddy bears and poems start to show up, lit by Virgin Mary candles, dripping and sputtering.
Perhaps its that all of these things just seem to muffle the grief, such a pure and awful and clean feeling - the cellophane and stuffed animals simply packing the wound, not healing but creating gangrenous areas of a community that should just be hacked off. Areas that become avoided, or planted with plaqued pines or maples.
It seems to me always impossible that so many people have anything to do with such sites of malice and accident and plottting. I understand it may be the human spirit, to share in the grief, the pain - but why does it have to be done so publicly, in the eye of the media?
Perhaps there is something lost in the translation of grief to those who have not encountered it. Perhaps it's just an objective eye.
The past few weeks the news has been saturated with school shootings, kidnappings and murders, criscrossing the country from Montreal to Kansas - uniting people in their gaudy grief. It seems like barely hours go by when the flowers and teddy bears and poems start to show up, lit by Virgin Mary candles, dripping and sputtering.
Perhaps its that all of these things just seem to muffle the grief, such a pure and awful and clean feeling - the cellophane and stuffed animals simply packing the wound, not healing but creating gangrenous areas of a community that should just be hacked off. Areas that become avoided, or planted with plaqued pines or maples.
It seems to me always impossible that so many people have anything to do with such sites of malice and accident and plottting. I understand it may be the human spirit, to share in the grief, the pain - but why does it have to be done so publicly, in the eye of the media?
Perhaps there is something lost in the translation of grief to those who have not encountered it. Perhaps it's just an objective eye.
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