Heard some interesting Cooper Anderson comments, about the bodies in New Orleans. He talked about having been in war-torn foreign countries, especially Rwanda, and having seen the bodies of the dead out in the open, left to decay and disappear along roadways and other public places. He went on to say that he never ever expected to see such things in the US. Why is it that the typical first-world citizen is so shocked to discover that they’re subject to death and decay just the same as the rest of the (impoverished) world?
The implicit attitude seems not one of just “Our standard of living and wealth ought to keep us free of such things”, but more one of “That stuff simply doesn’t happen here”. It’s utterly elitist to assume that just because you live in the first world, you’re immune to death, and failing that, that your corpse will be immediatly cleaned up and “properly” disposed of. i find it weird that people are impacted less by death itself than by where it occurs.
Get over it, people! Death happens to all of us, high or low. Everything dies, decays, and dissolves into nothingness as part of the most obvious lifecycle. Not many folks i know of are still into mummification; no matter how much you respect the dead, and no matter what your spirutal beliefs or views regarding an afterlife, there’s no denying that bodies are just fertilizer in the end, and we’ll all go that way eventually.
Death and decay isn’t something that just happens to the impoverished or unfortunate. As my good friend Mose Malone (a great BVI elder) waxed one day, discussing racism with me; “You cut off you arm, and I cut off mine. We put out on de fence, and soon come they both stink just de same.”