Tip for the day: If you find the article with a Google search for "A Culture Of Death, Not Life", you'll get the Times article, and you can read it from Google.

Personally, I don't think it's a 'Culture of Death'. I think it's a 'Culture of Pain' - a banquet of blood that starts with a gossip appetizer, goes through talk show salad and the meat and potatoes of news-for-entertainment-purposes (see whose baby got raped and murdered today!), 'reality' TV, and documentaries - "Just how DID she ditch the axe and clean up all the splattered blood and brains so quickly?" Death is just an ever-popular main course.

It might just be a distasteful part of human culture. Then again, maybe it's the flip side of something a lot more positive. Many of the same folks who stop at accidents and gawk will stop and help, if there's something for them to do. It's part of being a social animal. If these dead/dying/left-behind people lived next door and we mattered, maybe we'd bring them a casserole or walk their dog or something. The problem is that the world's too big to truly include us. We hear about all the bad stuff in the global neighborhood, but there's no way we can do anything to truly help. Instead, we focus on it here at Mudcat and maybe in meatspace. We gawk.