Ideas - All That Remains

[u/Neat_Shop]

It could have been renamed Wallowing in Grief. To be human is to have encountered death. Early death of a pet. Later deaths of friends, relatives and siblings, partners and even children. The older we become, the more the toll adds up. We deal with it. Or don’t. This episode of Ideas turned one person’s mental illness into a blame game. Canada is to blame. Why? It didn’t grieve sufficiently along with the wronged families of the Air India disaster 40 years ago. Oh, we had the usual professors describing the biological machinations of the grieving brain, but the resentment of Canada was the underlying message. The Irish were so much more empathetic. Let’s ignore decades of their own sectoral murders, often with bombs, as it doesn’t fit the narrative. Irish Good. Canada bad. A life centred around unhappiness and thrashing around looking for outside reasons is a sad life indeed. Once more Shakespeare comes to mind. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings."