Things We Lose

I am terribly sad about the fact that Kate Chopin's house in Cloutierville burned the other day. It's pretty much gutted, and many artifacts were apparently lost. It looks like grad students saved the originals to one of her collected works that was in the house (perhaps someone was studying it?) but the house is really gone. The best story online I found is this one from a local network: here. It's quite a loss, historically. She didn't live there all that long, apparently, but it doesn't matter.

I had always intended to go down there and see it, like when a friend who'd be into it came to visit. But I hadn't made the trek, and now I never will get the chance. Very sad, very sad.

Ah, Humanity

I was reading over a couple of various news stories just now while the babies are napping and husband is at work. I like to scroll through the google news feed just to see what's happening in the world, to keep up with the big headlines without getting too bogged down in the horror that can be the daily news.

I read over a blog/news post about the tragedy of the young boy who died of dry drowning and was horrified by the comments section where people argued over petty grammar issues and I'm positive one poster varied his/her pseudonym several times to make snarky, irrelevent comments. Several people tried to point out how petty it was to post about a grammar error in such a tragic blog post, but the majority of the large mass of comments was snarky argument. Then I scrolled down and saw a NYTimes post about the 78 year old man who was hit by a car while people passed by and did not help him. Granted, it apparently was only a minute or so, and some four people did call 911, but the image of that man lying there for that long alone in the street like a dog is in my head now. Finally, peering in on the catfight (I can't really call it much else) for publicity about Spike Lee & Clint Eastwood at Cannes was bad enough but then reading, again, over the comments section where people are bitching about tiny petty things rather than actually debating anything serious, are jumping to personal attacks and stupidness.

I'm frankly a bit sad about the state of the Internet, and humanity, right this second. IN the face of horror and human pain we worry about what coin Abe Lincoln is on, what grammar is used to report a tragedy, what links are used for referencing an issue.

Now, I'm all for spellcheck, and I believe firmly in people learning intelligent debate. But the level of pettiness in these several different examples of behavior just bums me out.