Why It's (Sometimes) Okay to Delight in the Theoretical Deaths of Others

I did not start blogging until nearly twenty years into my career as a professional writer. It took me a very long time to start thinking of myself as a blogger but the Big Whoop blog is easily one of the most creatively satisfying as well as challenging elements of this website. 

It’s very rare for me to write a blog post and then not publish it, in part because I see The Big Whoop as a casual conversation starter, nothing more, nothing less. So the stakes are generally pretty low. 

Yet I recently wrote a blog post that I kept pushing back and pushing back and pushing back until I decided not to publish it all, except as an exclusive for my Patreon donors. In it, I argued that no matter how frustrated or overwhelmed or defeated or angry people on the left might be, they should not cross the line into actively wishing for the deaths of anti-quarantine protesters or celebrating the deaths of COVID-19 skeptics and doubters. 

I wrote, in part, “When a quarantine protestor contracts COVID-19 it’s not deliciously ironic. It’s not cosmic justice at its finest. It’s not Karma working its brutal magic. It’s not unexpected but it is tragic and deeply sad because our lives have value and meaning even when we make astonishingly poor choices that not only hurt ourselves but hurt others as well.”

I did not publish the blog post in part because my wife disagreed strongly with its thesis and the more I thought about it, the more I came around to her way of thinking. 

What I wrote was undoubtedly well-intentioned. It was in fact perhaps too well intentioned, to the point of being borderline Pollyannaish in its take on the white-hot culture war being fought on social media every day and the pointless dogfights about every aspect of our society, but particularly this awful pandemic and the powerful people making an already tragic situation worse through greed and selfishness. 

But what ultimately made me think the blog post was not fit even for an intimate personal website was reading the comments on a friend’s Facebook wall where Trump detractors greeted the possibility that the same governors and free market extremists who are agitating angrily for the country and the economy to be re-opened as quickly and rashly as possible, regardless of the consequences, dying of the very virus whose dangers and deadliness they downplayed with no small amount of schadenfreude. 

Then a Trump supporter swept in to express open-mouthed horror that anyone would be cruel or callous enough to wish death upon another human being. He was shocked, yes, shocked! He cast unstinting judgment on these commenters from a place of wildly unearned moral superiority. 

When I see folks like that I am invariably driven to check out their Facebook profiles. I was not at all surprised to discover that, in addition to being horrified at people wishing ill upon a blameless exemplar of human dignity like Trump, this gentleman was VERY angry at a sinister Deep State intent on taking away his God-given right to own and operate an AR-15 and also wanting to raise the minimum wage, a development this fellow was sure would destroy capitalism and put all honest, decent business owners out of jail. He was also filled with rage at cautious souls for not wanting to re-open the country immediately when COVID-19 was obviously, in his estimation, an overblown hoax designed exclusively to hurt Trump. 

This dude was, in other words, not someone fit to cast moral judgment on anyone. Here’s the deal: you can’t belong to a death cult like the Republican Party under Trump and pretend that you care about human life. This dude was obviously absolutely fine with LOTS of people dying of COVID-19 as long as they were poor and powerless and abstractions whose deaths could grease the inhuman machinery of capitalism. 

He only pretended to care about human life because people on the other side of the political spectrum were disparaging a man he voted for and supported and clearly held in high regard.

Honestly, if the idea of Trump or Pence dying a horrible, ironic death helps you get through the night and survive this awful crisis, then I am certainly in no position to judge you for that. You do you, and hopefully we’ll make it through this waking nightmare with our lives and our senses of humor intact.

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