Creative Commons licensed photo courtesy of Flickr user John Perivolaris.

One may take Job to task on life being ‘full of misery’, but some day we shall all be ‘cut down like a flower’ and ‘flee’th as it were a shadow’. Death has been in the news a lot lately. It is never a comfortable subject. However it is a fact of life, and we do seem to hold some funny views towards it at present.

To begin with the ‘sanctity of human life’ question, which repeatedly cascades across the news. There is Patricia Hewitt coming out in favour of assisted suicide and the High Court ruling on ‘Baby OT’, then the absurd case of the nine-year-old rape victim in Brazil whose mother was excommunicated by the Catholic Church for getting her an abortion. UNICEF can remind us all it likes that a child dies needlessly every 3 seconds, and yet we still fixate upon the debate of ending un-savable or unborn lives, rather than saving those who so dearly want to live.

Our reluctance to celebrate the heroism of British troops in Afghanistan is another curiosity. They risk their lives in terrible conditions for some of the lowest wages in the land and, yes, they kill people to keep us safe. Can you name a single ‘hero’ of the conflict? This ambivalence is similarly found in the historically poorly attended homecoming parades of returning regiments. There is almost a squeamishness that to celebrate our soldiers condones killing in a way that sending them there in the first place does not.

The attitude to aerial bombing and precision weapons similarly seems to reflect this. Ever since Desert Storm we have somehow believed that they ‘sanitize’ warfare by their accuracy and abstraction from their targets. The Israeli offensive this spring set in sharp relief that this is not and has never been the case. It is strange how long we have clung to this illusion.

Looking in another direction still, there is the recent death of the celebrity Jade Goody, festooned across the British media. Orchestrated in part it was nonetheless the subject of an unusually high level of public interest. Why?

It seems that in Jade the truth was just too close to home. A star of reality television, she was less removed than most celebrities, more tangible, and the idea that she could die from cancer at 27 made it an unavoidable truth that any of us could. The response reveals the unwillingness to accept this. Her previous unpopularity seemed utterly forgotten as her story was grossly romanticized and turned into some great saga, almost as if her death was some noble act that absolved her of her misdeeds in life. Remind you of a car crash in 1997? A palatable romantic fiction was carved from the cold stone of reality.

People die, both from nature and from the hand of man. Accepting this is not to say that it is always right that they do. Ignoring the realities of it seems to be a dangerous luxury. Why is it our post-modern society holds such a contradictory jumble of ideas about such a basic element of our humanity?

Filed under: abortion, afghanistan, arabisraeliconflict, jadegoody on March 29th, 2009