So my friend JP posts about Ryan Dunn, who got famous doing the “Jackass” series of films.
Honestly the films looked so pointlessly stupid that I’ve never seen one. Nor did I know who Dunn was until he was drawn to my attention by my friend’s post. In essence my friend said:
“So Ryan Dunn crashed his car and killed himself. The good news is that it was a single-vehicle accident. I have no sympathy. You drink, you drive, you deserve to die. It could have been somebody else he killed.”
And I’m pissed. This friend would probably refer to herself as a Christian woman. Yet here she is stopping a hair’s breadth short of celebrating someone’s death.
Me, I find the death of people in stupid self-inflicted ways to be little different from all the other ways people die, possibly excepting old age.
I have no idea if Ryan Dunn has any kids. But if one of them had died in the car and he’d lived, would my friend be so smugly, self-righteously cavalier?
Would that punishment be “appropriate” because Dunn was putting other’s kids’ lives at risk?
Should we include his passenger (who also died) in our celebrations? He must have known the risks he was taking, riding with a drinking driver?
No. The only appropriate description is “tragedy.”
Would I feel differently had he actually taken someone out? Possibly, but intellectually I understand that that’s no less tragic. Death isn’t a mathematical quantity. If one villain dies, and two heroes die, the world doesn’t get more evil.
A man died.
I want to ask my friend: “Would you look into his mother’s eyes and tell her ‘Your dead son is not worth mourning?’”
