This is a whole new phenomenon that has crept into our way of life. It appears the underlying belief is that if something misfortunate happens to you or yours, then you have been wronged and by extension, someone else is guilty.
You are no longer misfortunate or unlucky or God forbid, responsible yourself. Oh no! You''re an innocent blameless victim. This is the new 'victim status' and once conferred, celebrity status could follow and then bright lights will beckon apparently.
It's pretty sick shit to my mind but it's everywhere now. Tonight on TV, a programme was dedicated to the victims of fatal crashes and it appealed to our emotional side with footage of distraught relatives following a coffin through rainy fields and tears at the graveside. Suitably muted voiceovers accompanied this all too familiar, if unwelcome scene. But it is the unspoken implication that somebody else is to blame that gets me because the human condition is frail from birth to death and shit does happen, to all of us.
Some believe in fate, some in a grand guiding hand but more and more people are turning to blame and victim status to assuage their loss some way, and perhaps get on telly. Tonights programme sought to make us all feel guilty for what we never did. Somehow we all conspired to target these poor families. Well fuck off with that because we didn't. Mankind wasn't designed to skit through the air at sixty miles per hour. We don't have the capacity to do it alone and when we do achieve that speed in a machine, we don't have the physical resistance to withstand something going wrong. We used to call those outcomes accidents because nobody set out to crash. Now somehow, they have become an attack on the innocent.
Death through illness is also on this menu because the dear departed is posthumously glorified for their near perfection so somebody else must be at fault. Nobody just gets a fatal disease and dies anymore. A party or parties must have conspired to cause it. Natural selection is out the window while fingers are pointed hither and yon to find the persecutor. Reality is skewed in favour of what, I wonder. On radio during the week a wealthy media man employed on a six figure salary told a breathless Nation that eight victims would die here that day from smoking. By implication, those eight people never freely bought a packet of fags themselves. Instead, you are invited to imagine, they were held at gunpoint until they smoked them and then robbed. But the point of the man's observation was the very idea that eight people should die. But statistically, eighty people die every day in this country and that is called life, like it or not. In two days time those eighty people will be buried and their funerals will not have TV cameras covering all of them because they can't.
And even if they could, who'd watch that every day? It's the sensationalism I can't stand like death is some kind of new blight that has just been inflicted on all of us by someone else. It's not and you'd better get used to it because your turn will come. In the meantime, can we just avoid making celebrities out of people who want to believe they are victims rather than just unfortunate. Can we stop sensationalizing all that is a natural part of the human condition. Unless we do I fear it will take another great war to really show what a victim actually is, and the weak minded will not be ready for war.