We live in an age with little respect for the dead. Little respect all round. It is sad.
Cain’t cure stoopit!
djm
I respect the Dead
stupidity& ignorance not so much
We regularly give copies of the Darwin Awards paperbacks to teenage boys that we know. We respect life plenty. We’re trying to save their lives.
I don’t know…I think it’s a requirement of the human condition that we find laughter in absurdity. Even when there’s death.
I do worry about people with no sense of reverence, but
I also think that to be able to find the funny–in many of life’s suckier situations–is a survival technique.
That’s an approach I had never considered: teach kids to respect their environment by learning to mock the vicissitudes of those who didn’t. Does it work?
djm
This essay by Garrison Keillor has a sort of Darwin Awards feel to it.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2008/12/17/flush/index.html
Here’s a snip–
Dec. 17, 2008 | It is rather haunting, the notice above the Flush button in the toilet on the airliner, “Do Not Flush While Seated on Toilet.” One imagines the engineers of the toilet running tests with flush dummies with big flat butts and the suction ripping the stuffing right out of them, and the engineers thinking, “Oh criminy, you mean we wasted three years on this sucker?” So lawyers were brought in to write the warning, which had to be short enough to be printed in large type so that geezers would see it, who are the ones most likely to flush while seated.
So they limited themselves to those seven words and eliminated “Flushing While Seated May Suck Your Colon Out Of You And Cut You A New Orifice While Changing Your Gender In Ways You Don’t Even Want To Think About.” […]
Yes, it does. My Mother taught us to play with matches at an early age and laughed when we got burnt. I do have to admit though, letting us smoke a cigarette backfired. I happened to have enjoyed the experience at 5 years of age.