Our once-proud nation really has come to something when people just cannot leave the poor Bigley family alone. I feel compelled to speak on the matter since I want to find out why people find it necessary to 'indulge' in one family's ultimate nightmare. The psychoanalysts had it right when they said that it's the indeterminacy, the not knowing, of what was happening to a captured loved one, that really screws you up. But the outcome is now clear for all to see, and people just can't leave the family alone to grieve privately.What really makes me bloody angry is people are always quick to jump to rash conclusions instead of deploying some sense of rationality in their thought processes. For instance:
Ken Bigley is dead. Therefore I must watch the video of him being beheaded and post messages of sympathy on forums around the world because that is what I aspire to - others seeing me as a genuine caring individual. If I do this then I feel I will make the world a better place. By sticking my nose into matters that don't concern me I am simultaneously satisfying my own curiosity and absolving my soul from guilt. Never mind the fact that his family probably want to be left well enough alone. Never mind the fact I'm sticking my nose in matters that don't fucking concern me. I'll just do what I want along with the rest of the trend-followers because I believe it's right to show grief in a proper way.
This is a mawkish, irrational, pathetic, (in the original sense of the word) fundamentally flawed argument in at least 6 places, and I don't have the energy to expend in order to list them here - you can probably see them for yourself.
If you care to cast your memory back, the exact same thing happened with the Soham murders of the two young girls. A horrific case, to be sure, but does it justify some families making a day trip to Soham in order to express their own flawed sympathies? What I think we are seeing, in sociological and anthropological terms, is a cultivating sense of fashionable grief, if you may excuse such an initially seemingly idiotic phrase. Consider: a case of national significance appears in the media. (which controls national thought anyway) The usual human emotive reaction, a primal one, is to sympathise internally. But what this national extrinsical outpouring of emotion illustrates is that in much the same way as it has become fashionable to go on pub crawls and fuck your liver over by the time you're 30, it has also become fashionable to jump on the National Bandwagon (Trademark) whenever anything of significant national interest occurs. In all honesty, I think 80% of the people expressing an opinion of the Soham murders didn't actually care a shit for the feelings of the murdered girls, their families, or anyone's feelings. They just did it to make themselves feel good and to try to project themselves further up society's own extremely-fucked-up hierarchy. And that is why fashionable grief is here to stay.
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