I was watching a 9/11 Documentary on the Twin Towers and realized that all the victims family members were describing happy moments, how much the victims enjoyed their job, life. And I wondered, this can’t be right. Where are all the mildly-severely depressed people who were working in the towers?
Is it to be seen positive, not to bring grief to family members and not be seen as ungrateful? Because it means two things:
People fear death and when faced with the prospect of their own death or that of a family members, react by trying to bury those feelings with positivity. Even when they know they didn’t enjoy life, it gives them a sense of hope.
Life is a bitch.
You don’t know what you don’t know.Suicidal/Depressed people tend to be isolated from family and the world. Most don’t discuss their feeling openly. So when they do die in these attacks, no one is there to share on the information and/or no one knew anything about how they felt in the first place.
One or more of the above.
None of the above.
.
Cancer patients, victims of serial killers etc, seem to follow the same trait. They were nice people who loved their family. Never do you hear about a nihilist who couldn’t be bothered by life or someone who was neutral about it.
And at the other end of the spectrum, are those who range from not minding if they died tomorrow, to wishing and planning for their death. Interestingly, these people seem to live ‘long’ lives uninterrupted by (natural or human) means which may or may not lead to death.
Whats your take on this.
I bet that it’s just a manifestation of the phenomenon where nobody wants to say anything bad about the dead.
Some douchebag financial trader who was a pretentious asshole might have liked to go to Florida and hit on married women, get really drunk, and maybe jet-ski for a couple hours out of a week long trip.
What would they say? “Bob was a good guy who loved water sports and the sun.”
People who are killed in tragedies are never described negatively. Everyone who dies is cheerful extrovert with a great sense of humor, who loved children and old people and puppies.
I can virtually guarantee that negative quotes get cut in editing in this type of documentary.
On the flip side, documentaries about serial killers have tons of negative comments and few positive.
I have yet to see a modern Hitler documentary showing him painting or fooling around with his girlfriend. I don’t even see his main military contribution, the tank blitz, described in a positive way.
I think in reality, everybody in the world probably has an equal number of people who will either say something positive or negative about them. Which are chosen for the show depends on the director’s purpose.
My stepfather (who is a lay minister) had to go to a funeral once for someone that died suddenly but was notoriously hateful (and generally despised) and didn’t seem to have any redeeming qualities. The officiating minister decided to face the situation head on. He said something like ‘We all are all here, not to honor the character or actions of the departed because he displayed few good examples of those but to acknowledge the death of a fellow human…’. He went on to give a general sermon about God’s forgiveness and the importance of ritual in the church regardless of the circumstances. I wasn’t there but it supposedly got the message across in the most tasteful way possible and didn’t make people feel like they were being scammed through revisionist history.
I created an expression about this, maybe it came from a song or something I read, but one day I was thinking about it: Can you truly hate a stranger? Can you truly hate someone if you know nothing about them? So, my thinking was: You can only truly hate someone you love. The fact that there were even people at the funeral shows that there must be some sort of caring, somewhere.
Do you really want to hear people eulogized as “He was a sad and generally pathetic human being whose final thought was relief at dying before his time”?
Maybe it’s just that jerks don’t have loved ones who are willing to do interviews about them? Honestly, who is going to front up for an interview, years after the fact, and say “She was a morose, rather surly woman. Few people were close to her. She was a pessimist, and she hated that office and her co-workers. She always said it would be just her luck to die at work.”?
The grieving families of dynamic, life loving people make better viewing than the indifferent families of raging assholes, or the mildly conflicted families of vaguely unpleasant people. Given the sheer number of victims it would surely be possible to create hours of footage from interviews with only 1 or 2% of the victims’ families.
“Oh yeah, it did seem like he was either disposing of human corpses or chopping them up. I was wondering why he kept borrowing my bone saw and headsman’s axe. But he would always leave me little gifts like small jewelry, children’s clothes, designer shoes, homemade sausage, etc. I started to think something was wrong when he wanted me to help him redo his basement into ‘The Dungeon’ and modified his ice cream truck to only be unlocked from the outside. And one time, he was watching some horror movie or something and the screams kept me up all night. I even asked him to turn it down but he didn’t, what a jerk!”
Actually a true story here: this guy I knew from elementary school got life in prison for stalking and killing his ex-girlfriend and her then-boyfriend. His other ex-girlfriend told me the story along with a story about how he chased her down on the freeway and forced her to pull over.
Everybody’s reaction who knew him: “I can totally see him doing that.”
Believe it or not there are some episodes of the series “WWII In Color” in which the narrator reads parts of Eva Braun’s diary in which she speaks quite fondly of him. She recounts some of their days together as almost idyllic. Of course there are other passages where she describes her life with him as miserable.
The series also takes a fairly unbiased look at Hitler and describes his prowess as an orator and a motivator and his ability to induce fierce loyalty in his associates.
In the end however it also does not shy away from the fact that this is a deeply, deeply, flawed and most likely psychotically disturbed individual who unleashed terror and evil upon the world on a scale almost indescribable.
It’s kind of odd to watch because they basically say “Yeah he was a total piece of shit who did unspeakable things, but believe it on not some people really liked the guy.”
What I mean is just modern documentary storytelling focuses on the bad for bad guys and good for victims/celebrities.
Left-Eye Lopez, for example, of TLC, was schizophrenic and somewhat of an arsonist. Most likely she was freaking out during the car accident that killed her. In both the TLC and Andre Rison (the boyfriend whose house she set fire to) documentaries, they completely glossed over her bad points.
I’m waiting to see how they tiptoe around Whitney Houston’s drug abuse, Michael Jackson’s bizarre behavior, or Michael Jordan’s illegitimate children.
I was watching a news item on TV about the murder of a teenage girl. One of the detectives commented," She was such a beautiful girl." I got the impression he wouldn’t have been so upset if she’d been a bit on the ugly side.
I think the main reasons you only hear good things about dead people are either :
Most people think it is in poor taste to say negative things about the dead since the dead can’t speak up for their side of the story or defend themselves. After all, quite often there is more than one side to a story.
If you don’t like someone, why would you care enough to bother writing them a eulogy/obituary or doing an interview about them? If someone doesn’t have any friends, they tend to die alone, there is no funeral for them, and nobody really thinks much about them after they are gone.
I have come to really dislike one of my elderly relatives.
She was unkind to her daughters growing up to the point that one of her daughters grew up questioning if her mother really loved her and still has issues from that.
She made a nasty and hurtful comment to me out of selfishness while I was preparing for my wedding that made me spend a day crying before I decided to cut her out of my life forever.
She STILL bitches about things my parents did 30 years ago (even though my parents have been dead for years at this point).
She tries to put on a big show of being “nice” even though she is actually being bitchy in a passive aggressive way.
Needless to say, I think she is a crummy person. However, since there are people out there who will miss her when she dies (probably including the daughter she mistreated, since even if your parent was shitty to you you often still have some feelings for them), when she dies I will just make a generic, diplomatic comment to the people who will miss her instead of actually saying what I really think of her.
Life’s a bitch. Most everybody knows it and they are, too. But if you accidently die heroically then everything around it is glorified. Ask the family of any soldier. Or innocent victim. Or bereaved parent. There has to be something to cling to.