I read that the funeral home tasked with handling arrangements for the Boston bomber is having trouble finding a cemetery that will take the remains. (He also has protesters outside his establishment.)
I’m thinking about Margaret “Milk Snatcher” Thatcher’s recent going-away event. Apparently the trick is, if you’re going to kill people, do it slowly and to enough people that you can’t possibly show them all on YouTube. Then you qualify for a multi-million dollar extravaganza!
Now, I don’t really care about funerals and the ceremonies that go with them. Just cremate me and get it over with! But it strikes me as incredibly mean (and yes, stupid) to add to this family’s pain by denying their son a final resting place.
I have sympathy for the family -even Jeffrey Wagner was someone’s beloved son- but I can also understand the reluctance of cemeteries to accept the body. The shock of the attack is still fresh and raw in the national psyche.
I had friends in that race who could have been killed or permanently maimed. The dude killed an 8 year old kid. He cost runners their legs.
So yeah, I can understand the “fuck him, we don’t want him” attitude and the desire to forget him entirely, leaving no sign of his existence. The killer -whose name I haven’t even bothered to learn- didn’t give a shit about his victims or THEIR families. Why should anyone give a shit about his family?
Autocorrect turned “Dahmer” into “Wagner”, btw…
Because we’re not homicidal ideologues, maybe?
Put it this way: I couldn’t care less what they do with his dead body, anymore than ibcare about what happened to Tim McVeigh or any other mass killer.
His father was going to come to the US, before he freaked about FBI questioning, to take the body back to Kazakhstan. His family would like to bury him in peace. So what is so hard about the concept of shipping the body to Kazakhstan? I’ll bet it would even be cheaper than all the security that not shipping it would require. Besides being the decent, human, civilized thing to do.
It’d be good for there to be a difference between non-barbarians and barbarians. Like, say, doing the decent thing rather than not doing it.