Not everything is grist for my mill

To a reader who had sent me a comment about the failure of the mother of the cannibal in Miami “to show an ounce of sorrow for the situation,” I wrote:

However, I’m not going to post this, not because your point is not valid, but because the whole story is too disturbing and I don’t want to get into it. Also, it seems to me that it is too extreme and horrible, too far outside any recognizable human behavior, to have any useful meaning. I don’t want to treat something this horrible as just another contemporary event to be analyzed, whether in terms of race or anything else.

- end of initial entry -

The reader replies:

That is a fair point, which I understand.

Sometimes I fear the news (and the Internet) is desensitizing me to an unhealthy point.

June 1

Brandon F. writes:

I appreciate your sobriety and wisdom. You are right about what you said. Instead of feeling desensitized like your reader I tend to get overwhelmed and angry with all the information available online. I read about that Russian homosexual last night that made a “snuff” film where he killed a man with an ice pick while sexually abusing him. How do we deal with such horrible news? Like you said it has no greater meaning to our cultural situation but the horror of this single act is haunting.

LA replies:

The type of crime you are describing (I haven’t read about it), while very extreme, has happened before and is of a piece with a society in which all morality and restraints have been destroyed. So I would say that it does have meaning to our cultural situation. The cannibalism incident in Miami is so far off the chart that I don’t know that it has any meaning. Of course this is a somewhat subjective evaluation by me and others could reasonably see it differently.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 31, 2012 07:57 PM | Send