Losing our humanity

I’ve made many remarks about how the country seems to be growing crazy. The most recent was in post below about the weather. There was discussion about this on an NPR show recently after a retired journalist died in an accident. The comment section of the obituary listed people pleased to read of her death:

CONAN: And the fact is, you note in your piece, a lot of the people who posted these nasty comments had never heard of her, either.

Ms. HENNEBERGER: No. That’s one of the things that struck me, is that it’s not that they had been nursing a grudge against Deborah Howell. They had first seen her name five minutes earlier, read a piece in which there were no references to her personal politics. She didn’t write about politics. She didn’t direct coverage in a way that was particularly political. But because the readers saw that she was a former newspaper woman, they assumed that that must mean she was a big lefty, and they were thus celebrating her death in a way that I found very upsetting.

CONAN: Celebrating?

Ms. HENNEBERGER: Celebrating. Saying to the effect of good riddance. As one of the posters said, one fewer of these anti-U.S. types to deal with. There were a lot of jokes. And I want to say, right off the top, that I don’t see this as only coming from one corner of the political spectrum. We see the same thing -I’ve seen the same thing on an obit we ran of Irving Kristol, the conservative.