why is the way you die so important?

Post Reply New Topic

just curious....a few years back a plane crashed on takeoff at the local airport. about 100 people were killed. naturally, the news media spent 24/7 covering this. the coverage tapered off gradually, but a month later it was still the lead story.

people were holding fund raisers for the children of the dead, to help with college and such.

memorials have been built. the local newspaper devoted a full page to each victim. they were all just the most wonderful human beings that ever lived, if you believed what was written.

throughout this period, there were all sorts of deaths by other means. car crashes, murders, suicides, falls, you name it. these were good for one or two paragraphs in the newspaper and 30 seconds of 'eyewitness news' coverage on the television. that was it. one day only. do you think they were all just terrible human beings and not like the saints who died on the airliner crash?

naturally, each aircrash victim's family received an average of 7.5 million dollars, according to lawyers associated with the case. everyone knew that was going to happen. yet the families took every cent collected by kids to 'help the poor children of the dead'.

deaths other than the air crash, well no one collected money for them. most families probably received very little and sometimes nothing at all if the deaths were causes by illegal non-citizens. no insurance.

no memorials, no pages in the newspaper on how great they were.

i've always known i have no clue when it comes to human actions. this seems so....so cruel.....that i feel i'm better off not understanding. i am curious though. can anyone explain this to me?

I don't understand it either. It never ceases to amaze me how people will let their emotions call all the shots. For instance, how some will spend billions, if not trillions, fighting terrorism. Yet when it comes to currently active threats to American lives with understood proven treatments (I'm talking about healthcare), they don't want to spend a dime. It befuddles me.

I think it comes down to 'which deaths make good story'. It's the selective, morbid interest of the media. Dying in an aircrash makes 'better story' than dying of diarrhea in a developing country. Humans have a natural fascination with death, 'Thanatos' as opposed to 'Eros', and the media plays on this basic drive by finding the most dramatic examples of death. The families of the crash victims are really being compensated for having their grief broadcast to a national audience.

Always remember that the media exists to sell itself.

It amazes me that people assume that all politicians or businessmen are corrupt because of the small percentage that are (that are nearly almost caught because it's good for both the media and the various law enforcement agencies that are involved) that the media shines a huge spotlight on (spotlight fallacy). Thank goodness the media would never be corrupt or anything like that and only report on things that allow it to sell itself better.

A lot of the negative ideas about how the world works are based on how the media functions. The truth is that the media rarely reports on good things happening because that's what they think will sell: Lots of bad with a little good.