Interestingly enough, my previous blog post was encouraging a person who is contemplating suicide to hold on for a little while longer. In the news today, I read that Chief Financial Officer of Freddie Mac committed suicide by hanging.
I was dismayed at a lot of the comments that I saw attached to some of the news articles with people saying things like, “Well, he deserved to die for the mess he put the country in.” and the like.
Regardless of how you feel about our current financial crisis, and who or what entity is at fault, does a person really deserve to die? Over money? Really? Are we, as a country, really going to start saying something like that?
And at what point does a person deserve to die over money? Is there a dollar amount? What would it be? Who decides?
Listen: this was a person. He had a family. He had a wife. He may have had kids (I don’t know, offhand). He probably had brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and probably a mother and father that are still alive (he was only 41). There’s now an entire family that is devastated that they didn’t see the warning signs; burdened with the fact that there was nothing they could do.
one savage night, a man took his own life because he couldn’t see a way out. That’s not a good thing. He didn’t deserve it. And I’m sad to say that there was nobody there to talk him out of it. What a poverty of morality exists in this country, when a troubled, angered, desperate man commits suicide… and we say that he deserved it. Over money.
I’m pretty ashamed to be affiliated with people like that, either by citizenship or otherwise. How troubling.