2008-12-21

The Stranger | Slog | A Life Goes On

The Stranger | Slog | A Life Goes On: "In our time, [Bernie Madoff's] hands are free from doing the one thing that, 90 years ago, the hands of an exposed deceiver would have done immediately: take their own life out of the hot spotlight of the scandal and leave the world with a cold corpse to denounce. What vanished in the Bush years was a code of honor with any real meat in it."

Right on. In a world devoid of any real moral compass, the slate is clear to etch our own values and enforce our own meanings of right and wrong. Somewhere along the way, our personal code of conduct lost its deference to society and the weight of behaving morally shifted away from a group-based context. Now it just seems like it's every man for himself and society is just a larger abstract, meaningless save for when one can point and say it owes you something.

If more people took suicide as a means of apologizing to society as a whole, the world would be a better place.

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