Every time there’s a military conflict, someone points out that many of the victims were NOT adult men. The theory is that a tragedy is way more tragic if anyone other than adult men get killed. If you throw a woman or a minor or a puppy into the mix then we all have a reason to be sadder and madder.I would also add the race element into the equation. If the victims are black, that's not nearly as tragic as if they were white, because there is a higher value to whiteness than blackness.
I totally agree with the view that some tragedies are more tragic than others, depending on who is involved. But I do demand efficiency. That’s why I propose ranking the value of all types of people so I can more easily judge how sad I should feel when they get killed.
For example, if 400 villagers are buried in a mudslide, I’d like to know how many of them were drunks, assholes, nags, dickheads, crooks, or males, just to pick a few examples. I wouldn’t feel as much pressure to feel bad about that portion of the village. In the best case scenario, the victims would all be adult men with no special talents. That’s barely even a tragedy. We adult males have our uses to be sure, but society agrees that it’s not such a big deal when someone kills us.
I think that the main reason there are so many wars is that most of the soldiers are adult males. If all wars had to be fought exclusively by second graders or contestants from the Special Olympics, no one would ever start a war because the results would be too tragic.
This is why when a young white girl goes missing, the national media grinds to a standstill in it's effort to cover the tragedy.
But my theory, as I've stated before, is that it's more related to sex than anything else. The level of tragedy is determined by how much you would have wanted to fuck the victim. That's why if there was say.. a convention with a bunch of pudgy middle aged white guys (god forbid including Matt Cooper), and the roof collapsed killing them all, I'd be in tears for days... Missing female teens in Aruba? Not so much...
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Oh no.. I'm not saying that what Foley did was okay, pages willing or not.. I'm just saying that we live in an exceptionally sexually opressive time. Traditionally, there was no "age of consent", and people were married far younger than they are today.. In fact, "traditional" marriage would violate most American laws.
But, for the record, the age of consent in D.C. is 16, so technically, Foley messing around with a 16 year old isn't a violation of law. Many people just find it distasteful because we're programmed to think that way.
The law Foley might have violated is one he wrote involving the use of the internet with a 16 year old... not sex itself.
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