Thursday, October 10, 2013
Which is better?
Local schools and media have been running nonstop memorial activity for two weeks after a couple of high-school kids died in a car accident.
It wasn't that way in the '60s. I'm thinking about an inconspicuous girl named Lana. She was absent for a couple weeks, then the teacher announced a new seating arrangement that filled in the chair Lana had occupied. Someone asked why. "Because she died." Oh.
And that was it. No ceremonies, no Grief Counselors, no teddy-bears on fences, no media coverage. Just revise the seating chart.
Which is better? I suspect the optimum is somewhere between.
Sidenote: We were tacitly led to believe that Lana had died from some unspecified illness, but I wasn't convinced. She hadn't seemed ill, she had seemed blank, like her soul had died long before her body. Lots of fathers in those days were drunken brutes. I don't know if that was the case with Lana, but the picture was unfortunately familiar.
That's another big difference between the two eras: today's parents and kids seem to get along in an amazingly positive way. Might be totally unprecedented in human history. I hope this generation gets a chance to take over before we fuck everything up.
¶ 6:41 AM 
