"Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee."
John Donne
I guess it's human nature for the mind to reject, to block out, unpleasant images and thoughts that challenge the things we deeply believe to be true about people.
I frequently encountered that mindset in the blogosphere the other day, after the news began to spread of the tragic murder-suicide in California.
In the unlikely event that you haven't heard about this, I'll briefly recap what little is known about it at this point. After he and his wife had been terminated from their jobs, a man in southern California is believed to have killed his wife and five children, then apparently turned the gun on himself. I say he is the apparent perpetrator because police found the gun next to his body. There were no eyewitnesses that I know of.
Los Angeles police — who are no strangers to drive-by shootings and violent crimes — are describing the scene as one of the worst they've ever witnessed.
A neighbor told CNN, "There was an officer who came out of the house throwing up."
The other night, I was reading posts at other sites and blogs in which people were judging the man in some of the harshest ways imaginable. The man was "selfish," one person wrote, adding — with no evidence to back it up — that he worshipped money and the only thing that mattered to him was material possessions.
Actually, I wouldn't say that. I would be more inclined to apply the label of "selfish" to someone like John List, an unemployed accountant who planned and then carried out the murders of his family in 1971, then spent more than 17 years as a fugitive before he was captured after his story was told on "America's Most Wanted."
List died at the age of 82 last year, more than 35 years after he killed his mother, his wife and his three children.
The man in southern California, Ervin Lupoe, took the easy way out, someone else wrote the other night. I disagree. John List took the easy way out. Lupoe's actions were wrong, but he did not choose to start his life over after ending the lives of his family members, the way List did. He accepted the same fate he apparently forced upon his wife and children (some are suggesting that Lupoe and his wife made this decision together and that he was the one who carried out the plan).
Whether one believes in God or not, whether one believes in an afterlife or not, whether one believes that someone who takes his life and/or the lives of others will spend the rest of eternity paying for it in hell, it is a point, in my opinion, that is beyond dispute.
Some people will refuse to accept it, though. Some people are slaves to their lifelong conclusions about not only murder and suicide but also about unemployment and recessions and related matters. They simply refuse to consider other factors.
Some people treat economics like it's all a theoretical subject in school. Certain conditions lead to an increase in unemployment, therefore certain actions must be taken to improve the economy and, as a result, the number of unemployed will go down. It's all a numbers game.
No, it isn't. Fortunately, there are those who seem to understand that many people feel pushed to the brink. But the fact that many don't comprehend it fosters a feeling of further isolation.
That's people we're talking about. Not numbers. Not percentages. People.
And there are some who insist on seeing the unemployed as lazy and shiftless, people who would rather sit around at home and collect money from the government than earn a paycheck.
CNN reports that counselors are saying that it's bad out there. It quotes one counselor who says things have never been so bad in her tenure. "[T]he people that we're dealing with now, they have always had [money]," she says. "They went to school, they were able to get jobs. Now the jobs are not even out there."
That contradicts what I keep hearing, over and over, from conservatives who say that this is just a recession, that it is no worse than others we've seen. If the unemployed had any gumption, some say, they'd go out and find work instead of living off government handouts.
Those people, obviously, haven't been looking for work recently. And they're not paying attention to the fact that many of the people who are unemployed went to college. They worked hard, and they earned their bachelor's degrees and master's degrees — which they believed were their tickets to lives of security.
Now that they've been cut off at the knees, should we be surprised that they look at those degrees now as nothing more than expensive wall decorations?
Sure, those degrees represent accomplishments. They show a depth of dedication, a willingness to make sacrifices for long-term goals, and those people should be proud of those achievements. What's more, those are personal qualities that any employer should find desirable in his/her employees.
But, for those who have submitted hundreds of résumés but haven't received any calls from employers, that isn't much consolation.
Those who haven't lost their jobs should be thankful that they still have them and should do whatever they must do to keep them. But there is only so much a person can do. If an employer has to make an unpleasant choice in order to remain in operation, the employer will make that choice — and may not give much thought to the human consequences.
As the saying goes, it's a dog eat dog world out there. And, as the famous beer-swilling Norm from "Cheers!" once said, "I'm wearing Milk Bone underwear."
By the way, the quotation at the top of this post was inspired by the 1624 Meditation 17, from "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions." In turn, it served as the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway's novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and Thomas Merton's "No Man is an Island."
The original passage is worth reading on this occasion:
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee ... "
No comments:
Post a Comment