More in pity than in anger (but there's some anger in me)

[pecunium]

Over at Hullabaloo tristero has a post about the death of a couple of the soldiers who penned the op-ed in the WaPo.

He thinks it wasn't an accident. He doesn't think it was intentional, but he does think it was combat related; maybe even a Uriah moment.

Me, I think accident is a likely reason.

That's not what I'm really writing about though. It's certainly not why this is, at the moment, locked.

No, it's a poster, under the name Jill Bains, in the comments, who has offended me.

She, you see, would be happy if I were killed.

Why?

Because I am a soldier, and the deaths of soldiers might stop the advance of the American, imperial terror occupation. Honest, she said that, right after saying the death of soldiers might be seen, with a certain regret as a positive.

Fuck that. I havee a certain regret that I never told Jennifer Gertzkin how I felt about her when I was in High School. I have a certain regret I never got to eat at The Chronicle in Pasadena, and that I didn't know Mon Grenier was closing, and so eat a valedictory meal there.

I have a certain regret that I have Reiter's Syndrome.

The death of someone is not something one faces with a certain regret. It's possible to have a certain regret that one had to kill someone; but that's circumstantial, contingent on need having forced one's hand.

But for someone one doesn't know, to feel a "certain" regret that their death furthered your political aims, that's incomprehensible to me. It's psychopathic. Immoral.

Hell, I kill people (even if only at a remove, or two). I can live with that. But I don't wish for those deaths. So it's not the death part that offends me. It's the callous disregard for what those deaths she's wishing mean.

Words fail me. Saying, "Fuck her" or "The back of my hand to her," or, desiring that she might,
go down
To the vile dust, from whence (s)he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.
as Scot's subject in the last canto of "Lay of the Last Minstrel," will is both too much, and not enough.

I guess, for all the things I've seen people do, and say, to each other, that I read it, and read it again, and can't really believe it.

Comments

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

In person, we might well sometimes encounter a few people who would be stupid, thoughtless, or psychopathic enough to say things like that, but we don't know it because they're not people with whom we converse on topics of any serious depth. On the internet, they'll pop up much more frequently. There doesn't seem to be much that can be done about it. *sigh*

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

No, not really.

On the flip side, when I do enounter them on the net, I am much less willing to pass on calling them out for it.

TK

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Nor should you. What color is the sky in her reality where it's okay to say that?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Black, or white perhap; with lousy sunsets.

TK

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Sunsets are an imperialist-capitalist attempt to distract the masses from their revolutionary duties with aesthetic temptations. /snark.