During one of those click-throughs, I spotted a link to a blog posting with the following title: "Man Beats His Wife to Death for Understandable Reason".
Well. Let's see what that "understandable reason" is.
Clicking the link led me to what appears to be a content blogging mill of some sort, an outfit that depends on hundreds or thousands of writers submitting content for pageviews-per-click or some other nonsense. The post was about a man who found his wife killing his children and attempting to kill herself afterwards. Apparently he was so enraged by the entire event that he decided to help her along in the process.
It wasn't the story that got me. It was the following.
Understandably, the man lost control. And what he did next may make him spend the next decade in prison. He picked up a flashlight and he beat his wife to death. Is it bad that I don't even blame him?
Putting myself in his shoes is a sickening task, but the idea that I might return home one day to find my children strangled by their father is almost too painful to bear. Would I kill him? Maybe. It's hard to say.
The rage I would feel would be unbearable. Can you imagine? No one could suggest that he was in his right mind. He had just found his tiny son cold and lifeless and the murderer was standing right in front of him. Spouse or not, it's hard to imagine a person who wouldn't do the same.
Beating someone to death is never the rational, intelligent way to handle a situation, but Smeltzer wasn't in his rational mind. Other reports claim he was using cocaine, which, admittedly, would make a person a bit more irrational. But even if he were completely sober, can any parent really believe they wouldn't do the same?
First of all, I'd never want myself in this man's shoes. Second, I wouldn't know if I'd be driven to "understandably" beat my wife to death for killing my children and attempting to kill herself in the process. I could say I'd call the cops and try to get her suicidal ass some medical help, but what people say and do are two completely different things. But beating someone to death isn't "understandable," at least not in my opinion.
Perhaps I'm making a bigger issue of this than need be. Or perhaps its the lackadaisical and somewhat flippant tone of the post that's got me going "what the fuck". The whole tone just makes the entire piece utterly mundane, trivial even. Or the excuse-making in regards to the whole cocaine bit. It's not every day that I read something and have that "something's off here" alarm set off.
If you're going to make a blog post solely for page views, do a better job of picking the subject matter, because some matters deserve to be written with a bit more...humanity.
