Loss

Don’t get me wrong, Bush. As you've probably guessed, I’m with Cindy Sheehan all the way. I’m less sure, honestly, whether or not I’m with Carol Ernst, or Jim Terbush: I’m not sufficiently familiar with the facts of their cases. They certainly have my sympathy, because all three of these people have lost loved ones. What bothers me a bit is that each of them is driven to find someone or something to accept responsibility for their loss.

You know about Cindy Sheehan, Bush. I don’t need to tell you about her. And you’ll have heard of Carol Ernst, even if the name doesn’t ring a bell immediately. She’s the woman who won her case against Merck last week, in the death of her husband in connection with the drug Vioxx. The jury awarded her a handsome $253.5 million, as you probably read--with some rising dander! No wonder you’re spending so much of that "political capital" you claim to have earned on protecting your pals in the medical and pharmaceutical industries and their related insurance companies! At this rate, who knows, they could soon go broke!

You may not have heard of Jim Terbush, though. He was featured in yesterday’s edition of the Los Angeles Times as the father of a young man, Peter (I always empathize with someone who shares my name,) who died in a rock-climbing accident in Yosemite. The father, himself a climber, has filed a $10 million lawsuit against your National Park Service, claiming that human intervention in the form of a "bathroom system prone to overflow" at the top of the cliff caused the rockslide that killed his son.

Now I’m not a big anti-lawsuit man, Bush. I’m not one of those fanatics who believe that lawyers and lawsuits are the cause of all of this country’s problems, as some of your cronies seem to do. I do believe that a person should have recourse to the protection of the law to right a wrong, and that lawsuits are a healthy and much-needed deterrent to corporate and business malfeasance. And, as I say, I don’t know enough about the details of the suits brought by Carol Ernst and Jim Terbush to have even a lay person’s opinion as to the rights and wrongs. But I do most genuinely sympathize with them on their loss.

What interests me, though—and, as I say, bothers me some—is the difficulty we Americans seem to have in accepting loss. In good part, I believe this is a perfectly normal human reaction: it’s hard for us to say goodbye to loved ones. We mourn them, and miss having them in our lives. And, not least perhaps, their loss reminds us uncomfortably of our own mortality: not long before it gets to be our turn to leave for parts unknown. Or no place. Or to come back, of course, in some other form, depending on your belief system. Well, not really even that, because who really knows whose belief system happens to be the correct one, from this point of view? You might fervently believe in the Christian idea of Heaven, and still come back as a hairy ape. To my own way of thinking, it’s anybody’s guess.

At the same time, I do think that we tend to take these things a little too far, particularly in America today. It’s almost as though life itself, along with all our other privileges, were an entitlement; should those we love lose it, someone must be held accountable. No matter that death extends no privilege to anyone, and acts with random impunity. Not matter that it seizes young and old, fair and dark, the able-bodied along with the sick and ailing, the smart along with the dolts among us. No matter that, reasonably, in our heads, we know that it’s as inevitable as it is unpredictable. Death is not fair. It’s not even-handed. It doesn’t come when we want it or are ready for it. It’s not judicious. It just is.

At the same time, these facts don’t excuse murder. They don’t excuse playing with the life of any other human. They don’t excuse negligence or carelessness.

So, Bush, I don’t want to spare anyone responsibility for his actions. I certainly don’t want to spare you responsibility for yours, since they affect the lives of everyone on this planet. At the same time, these good people, in their pain and anger come along to remind me, acutely, that the reluctance to accept our loss can sometimes serve no better purpose than to increase our suffering. Please, this is not about them, or the justice of their cause. No. I’m in no position to judge any one of them on this score. It’s more in the way of a simple philosophical speculation on the experience of loss, and how we, as a society, handle it.

I wonder how you think about this problem, Bush? You, who do happen to hold the lives of many in your hands. Who can bring about loss of life with a stroke of the pen. I can’t begin to imagine the responsibility of sending people to their deaths. Yet you managed it fine in Texas, even before becoming President. Perhaps, like those Moslems who preach suicide to young men, your religious faith in an afterlife makes things easier for you, or more reasonable. Me, I’d need a better reason than the ones you’ve offered us thus far.