Not Me

Yesterday's news brought fresh tragedy, and the bar keeps getting higher. I don't know if it's possible for anything to be big enough to stun people into respect, but I haven't seen anything lately. Yesterday a plane went down over the Ukraine. Ukraine has had problems enough without the likes of this, but then so has the air carrier, Malaysian Airlines. No one can be left alone with sadness enough to reach a breaking point these days.

They say, incredibly enough, that the plane seems to have been shot down by a surface to air missile. Who did it remains unknown, and I confess I can't help but wonder why it would be done. I would understand if there'd been some kind of warning- a ransom demand seems logical. If terms weren't met, then I'd understand why the plane was shot down. If the plane posed some kind of threat (at least a perceived one), I'd understand. If someone fessed up and declared it a horrible accident, I'd understand. I don't understand yet. Maybe I will.

Something else I don't understand is how people react to a thing like this. That there should be jokes within hours of such horror is beyond me. Perhaps some mustered it up in minutes. I felt too dispirited to make jokes about much of anything yesterday, but others were apparently eager to take on this plane getting shot down. Maybe they felt the urge to help by neutralizing something very horrifying with humor. I don't think what I saw worked for that.

It does work to use jokes to ease a sad or scary situation. It helps if you don't aim at the people who are suffering. I saw a joke about the airline not being able to deliver passengers to their destination alive. I would have thought an airline with two disasters horrifically high in casualties has had enough, especially when the cause of the second- a damn missile- is not the kind of thing that diligent mechanics can do much about. I thought it was a lousy, mean joke.

Not that any joke would have been ok to me yesterday. I must be some kind of minority. I'm not very interesting in jumping on top of every tragedy and wringing a joke out of it like it's some kind of daredevil challenge. When a thing like this happens, I get very sad, and I let myself feel that way as long as I must. The next day I may feel well enough to make jokes, although probably not about that thing. I wish other people would wait a while even if they don't feel any human sadness inside over something as awful as this. I guess that's just not possible anymore.