It was sad to hear of the nurse lady in the U.K. committing suicide apparently because of her unwitting involvement in a hoax perpetrated on the royal family the other day. All human life is sacred and God expects that we treat each other with care and respect.
But on the other hand, lets not go off the deep end here. This was a hoax, funny, crass and it really shouldn’t have involved ‘ordinary’ people who have a hard enough time in their day to day lives without dealing with this kind of crap. But it was just a hoax and the woman in question was not directly involved in the sense that we would have any idea who she was. If she hadn’t committed suicide we still wouldn’t know her or connect her to the events of that day.
And how far do you take it? I just watched a very good and amusing piece on the CBC out of Halifax about how a SMART car owner was able to park her car in pay street parking spots between two fully paid up cars and get away without having to pay for parking. Witty and informative and a little bit controversial but not a bad news story that could harm anyone. Or could it?
At one point in the story there was a brief video image of two parking enforcement people scratching their heads and wondering about whether they should ticket the little car or not. They looked like they didn’t quite know what to do. We didn’t see their faces but we (and especially their friends and colleagues) would have been able to figure out who they were.
But here’s the thing. What if one of these parking enforcement folks, seeing the episode, decided that they looked foolish and had been publicly mocked in some way, and killed him/herself? Now what do we do? Now how do we respond? Did the CBC cause this death? Should the CBC not have aired the story because of the possible risk of this occurring?
This is actually a far trickier and more complex issue than the mainstream media are making it seem. And it’s to their potential detriment to pursue the two ‘shock jocks’ who perpetrated this hoax in the simplistic manner that they’ve been so far doing. There are all sorts of potential scenarios in which this same end result could occur but at some point rationality and common sense have to take hold.
Although those are increasingly becoming difficult concepts to find in our decaying society.
