I'm Resigning From the Human Race

...because I obviously don't belong in it.
The vitriol surrounding the death of Margaret Thatcher is a frightening thing to behold. "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead" is #27 on the British iTunes download chart this morning. It isn't because The Wizard of Oz aired in Britain last week.
In several Internet fora I have posted the following:

You know, folks, it's okay to dislike, or even to hate, Margaret Thatcher's policies from her time in office. It is not okay to hate *her*, and it is *certainly* not okay to cheer at her death.

Some people have agreed with me. Some. But there's been quite a bit of this:

Yes you can, she was innately evil and any hatred is justified. Who cares if someone is a human being if they're utter rubbish as one?



I'm reminded of the death of Jack Layton and Christie Blatchford's nasty anti-elegy penned before the body was cold. You don't have to be liberal or conservative to be rude and unseemly: just human, it seems.

There really is no middle of the road any more, is there? People are either loved or they're hated. The love is eternal and the hate is hellacious. I feel weird every time I have a "meh" reaction--which is pretty often, because let's face it, the majority of the world is kinda meh as far as I'm concerned.

Maybe that's why I'm having trouble dealing with the world lately. It's hard to stay on an even keel when everyone's battering you with expectations at every turn. The Blue Jays are 2-5 to start a 162 game baseball season in which, if you believed the hype, the team was supposed to go 324-0. Accordingly, the world is ending: everybody out of the pool and off the wagon, okay?

American politics keeps on keeping on: the country's going to hell in the proverbial handbasket and it's all the fault of the Republocrats.

It comes out most when a politician dies, for some reason. The time to publicly rejoice or lament a politician, in my view, is when he or she passes from elected office, not from life. But in the case of Thatcher, Layton, Chavez...you get the distinct impression that if these people weren't dead, a vast number of people would be more than happy to kill them.

Indeed -- and I don't mean to be alarmist -- I'm getting that distinct impression more and more often of late, that the only thing holding us back from widespread violence is social convention. Which may or may not be fraying.

So I hereby submit my letter of resignation from humanity. It's been an interesting time in the company of humans and I have learned a great deal that will benefit me in future endeavours. I'll still be around to keep an eye on you, though: you humans are simply to unstable for me to be able to afford not to.