Month: September 2012

Time to rumble with some #madwriting! It’s been a long time since I’ve done this and since I still haven’t done my 750words.com writing for the day, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do it. Time to see what I can pull off…

First off, I’d like to say that I have kind of a vindictive streak, at least when it comes to people who deserve it. I’ll try and keep this as general as possible on the off chance that some of the involved parties read this and realize that I’m making fun of them. Basically, it’s an organization with a board made up of a bunch of people. What’s relevant about that is because someone is writing a newsletter for said organization and she wants a certain amount of money. They can’t afford to pay her that much and upon hearing that news, one of the board members sent out a fairly extensive e-mail about how there’s a bunch of money in some other funds, they paid her predecessor that amount, blah blah blah. There’s just one big problem:

He’s her husband.

Upon joining the board, he signed a conflict of interest form and his wife getting money is definitely a conflict of interest. I wanted to help write a simple e-mail about the situation, which really would have been one sentence: “We appreciate your concern, but we cannot accept any input from you in this matter due to your conflict of interest.”

The official e-mail that went out to the board included a lot of additional information and wasn’t nearly as direct and blunt, but it still pointed out the fact that due to said conflict, that board member should exempt himself from the vote. Every time I read that message, I start giggling and thinking about how pissed off he’s going to be when he opens that e-mail and reads it. “You’re not allowed to vote, so you might as well stop bitching now.” I know it doesn’t say that, but that’s what floats through my head, which is why I keep giggling about it. Does that make me a bad person? Eh, even if it does, I’m willing to accept the consequences. He wasn’t nice and started throwing some dirt, he got some dirt thrown back at him and it’s possible that I’m taking too much joy in the situation, but I can live with that.

But since I’m on a madwriting streak here and still have plenty of time to write, there’s something I want to touch on about a comment made on here earlier. Someone was really upset at The Onion because of an article it wrote on Patriot Day, focusing on how young people might be in the army, fighting for… well, they don’t know why. The World Trade Center went down 11 years ago, so 18-year-olds in the army would have been really, really young when it happened and probably wouldn’t appreciate the significance of the event. That struck a chord with me.

It also struck a chord with someone else, but not a good one. Why? Because her mother died in one of those towers. She lost someone very close to her and it seemed like The Onion was tormenting that loss, making fun of it and it cut deep. I don’t blame her in the least for being upset.

Before I continue, I want to emphasize that specifically: if you’ve lost anyone in a tragic accident, you have the right to be mad. Really mad. Whether it was the World Trade Center or shooting up the movie theater while The Dark Knight Rises was playing or losing a family member because someone was driving home drunk… it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are. You can attribute the blame to someone—someone could have acted differently and your loved one would still be alive. That “someone” did something really bad and you have the right to be mad. I’ll never question that.

What I don’t… well, I don’t want to say I question it, but I wonder if we should feel obligated to have the same emotional connection to such tragic events. I didn’t lose a loved one in any accidents or incidents or what have you. A close friend of mine lost her brother in Afghanistan, so the war means something very important to her. The blog commenter lost her mother to the World Trade Center disaster, so she’s got a major emotional investment in its occurrence. Me? Not so much. I felt horrible when it happened, but as time has passed, I’ve become somewhat distant in comparison.

In a way, I compare it to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, except Kevin Bacon is Death. Kind of a twisted metaphor, but bear with me. If a loved one dies for whatever reason, it hits you hard. One degree. If a friend’s loved one dies, you feel the loss through that friend. Two degrees. You empathize with your friend, but that loved one… there’s simply not the same connection. No one should expect you to want to care as much about the dead person as you do for your friend.

Take it a step further to three degrees: a friend of a friend of a friend dies. Do you know that friend? At all? Sure, there’s a general sense of loss, but if you’re not grieving, should you be considered a bad person for that? It seems like the natural way of things: the closer you are to something, the more it affects you. The further away you are, the less it does. Hell, if you’re grieving for everyone who’s within three degrees, you’re non-functional. Too much emotional trauma. Maybe it’s a way for your brain to cope: you can only handle so much suffering at once before you go into a state of proverbial emotional overload.

And aside from the “six degrees” I mentioned, there tends to be a level of proximity as well: the closer something occurs to you, the more significance it has. If a car crash happens near your house and some people die as a result, it doesn’t matter whether you knew them or not. It was in your backyard—it happened right there. If you’d been two blocks away from your house, you might have seen it. That’s a scary thought, seeing someone die in a fiery car crash. I’m glad I haven’t seen one.

But they happen all the time. I haven’t seen one, I haven’t had one happen anywhere near me, I don’t know anyone who’s been in a fiery car crash, so that idea doesn’t bother me very much. I don’t stay awake at night feeling traumatized about the fact that fiery car crashes happen all the time. If I did, again, emotional overload.

New Yorkers had the buildings fall down in their neighborhood—they had a reason to care. But what if a building collapsed halfway across the world? Did they have the same emotional investment when the tsunami hit Japan, powerful enough to destroy nuclear power plants? Who knows how many lives were lost? Not us. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was all over the news and people were immensely concerned about what was happening and what we were doing to fix it. The tsunami? AIDS? World hunger? How often do you hear about that on the 6:00 news versus a fiery car crash that happened in your neighborhood?

So I can’t relate with someone who lost a family member when the World Trade Center collapsed—I feel bad for the person, but I wouldn’t be so demeaning as to assume that I feel the same kind of pain. At least for me, it comes down to those six degrees: how deeply something affects me emotionally depends in large part on my own connection to it. What is my relationship to a person, how close did it occur… what kind of effect did it have on me personally? That sounds kinda shallow when I put it that way… I blame Kevin Bacon.