Stupid Is As Stupid Dies

Y'know, people probably think me heartless.
Maybe I am, at that.
It's just that when people get injured--or die--as a result of their own stupidity or reckless disregard, I just...can't...bring myself to feel all that sorry.
There's been a spate of such incidents this week. A mother lost a second son to gun violence in Toronto the other day. Confronted with the writeup in the Star here, it's hard not to feel some measure of sympathy. But then, the Star specializes in sympathy: its columnists even admit as much. In a recent radio campaign, one of them said "my job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted": the Toronto Star in a nutshell. Funny, I thought a newspaper's job was to report the news.
Anyway, it falls upon the sloppy, sensationalist Sun to
pick up the slack and note just how well Karim Rashid Ata-Ayi was known to police. It appears this young man had been running with the wrong crowd for quite some time. I don't see his death as a tragedy: more of an inevitability.
Incidentally, in all the reporting of this story I've seen (Sun, Star, Post, and Global National last night--nobody ever mentioned the word "father" anywhere. That word was most conspicuous in its total absence. It's almost as if people are afraid to mention it...just like they're afraid to mention that it always seems to be the Karims and Kwames and Jafars that are shooting each other, rarely the Pauls and Jims and Jasons of the world.
Growing up fatherless in a culture that glorifies gun violence, it's little wonder so many of these kids wind up dead. At this point it's hardly news anymore when one of them is killed. And that is sad--very sad--but it'll never change if the root causes (a pet phrase of the "comfort-the-afflicted-and-afflict-the-comforted" set) are ignored. Those root causes, by the way, have very little to do with poverty: there are hundreds of millions of children the world over growing up in far greater poverty than anyone in Regent Park can even imagine...and they're not mowing each other down like weeds.
Moving on...just down the road a piece, and still in Toronto...we have the townhouse that burned to the ground just three days before Christmas. Three kids were able to escape; two others died with their mother in the flames. Sad story, yes?
No.
As reported in the Post here, it turns out the smoke detector had been deliberately disconnected, presumably by the mother, some time before. Apparently this is quite common: "People see them [smoke detectors] as a nuisance, not a life-saving device . . . (so) they find ways to get rid of them or de-activate them", says Kevin Nakamura, the chief operating officer for Toronto Community Housing.
Yet another example of the whole notion of consequence being thrown out the window in this latter age. You disconnect your "nuisance" smoke detector and then die in a fire, that's natural law asserting itself, nothing more. Just like what happens when you choose not to wear a seatbelt, then get ejected from your car and die in a bloody heap by the side of the road. On some level--and I know just how foreign a concept this is, lately--you're asking for it. Begging for it, even.
If it turns out that teen who
died at the San Francisco Zoo actually did taunt a 350-lb. Siberian tiger (and I must stress that this allegation hasn't been proven), then he surely wouldn't have been all that surprised at the reaction. And yes, I know zoos are supposed to keep their human patrons and animal charges separate. That said, many different animal species are notorious escape artists, and no environment is ever, or can ever be made, wholly safe.

That's one of the dominant illusions of our time: that the environment can be made utterly safe, and that such safety is eminently desirable. The truth is, without exposure to at least some danger, children grow up thinking they're invincible, lacking the skills to recognize and cope with danger when it shows up.

But you see it everywhere, in the aftermath of almost every incident where someone is hurt or killed. Pickup truck slides off the road? There should have been a barrier to prevent it. Kids getting fat? Ban trans fats, that's the ticket. After some gun murders, you even hear calls for the banning of guns...which are already banned.

Look, there are cases, many of them, where people do everything "right", where they don't act like idiots, and still end up hurt or dead. And in those cases I still have the capacity to feel sadness. But I stopped grieving the endless stupidity of the human race a long time ago. Right about the time I realized it was endless, in fact.