#cosigned!

no thank YOU for speaking. EXCELLENT choices

I have this theory that after the credits we'll fade into dave sitting in his office and kurt coming in with their kid just like the scene he imagined. kurt sans mustache, of course.

Yes, beautiful.

Curious concepts, to be sure. If you are unfortunate enough to encounter the bottom half of the internet, you might be forgiven for thinking that no such things exist.

Human beings are, as a species, social creatures. The majority of us would not survive 'in the wild' as solitary individuals, however appealing it might be to attempt it. We have survived to take on our current form because we cooperate. We interact. We bond. We communicate. We empathise. Some of us may do so more, or less, or differently, but it is what we do. We have compassion.

In this world of so many communications media, we are constantly made aware of the existence of more humans than we can fully comprehend.   We know that they are human like us. We can, if we stop to think about any one individual, picture them as having thoughts and feelings like our own. They become a person to us. But until we focus they are simply a number, a statistic. 

It is easier to empathise with someone with whom you share common traits. A young middle-class American is immensely identifiable to a young middle-class English speaker from the first world, immersed in American media. In other words, to a very high proportion of Tumblr users, though admittedly not all of them.

I defy anyone who fits that demographic to listen for many long minutes to a person who has just destroyed his life and his family, has encountered the bloodshed and death that so many of us are privileged to live our lives insulted from; to listen to a person in shock, as awareness of the situation drips disjointedly into place, the little thoughts that occur, voiced unfiltered to the safe sympathetic listener who represents all the world that's left to cling to, to the remembered politeness in thanking the kind, warm, reassuring person who has just given him his directions into a new life that neither he nor the listener can truly imagine. I defy anyone to listen to that and not feel empathy for the murderer who is just as lost as they would have been if their own lives had somehow skidded down that course. 

The teenage girl and her mother who have just died. The man who will shortly receive the call telling him that his wife and youngest child are dead at the hands of his second-youngest. The grandparents and granddaughter across the street. The young woman at university. They are statistics. Concentrate, and the enormity of their loss can be vividly imagined. But the boy on the phone's loss needs no imagining, no concentration, because it is right there. 

It would not greatly surprise me to hear that the recording was first circulated by parties interested in or involved with his defence in the consequent trial.

It distresses me (possibly not so much as it distresses my brother) the proliferation of comments along the lines of "How can you have sympathy for him you should have sympathy for the people he MURDERED!", and not only because of the grammar. How can you not feel any sympathy listening to that recording? And how would that impede your feeling sympathy for his victims and, indeed, for the grieving relatives who are both still alive to suffer and innocent of premeditated homicide? Not perhaps so distressing as the people who spare no sympathy at all for the rest of the family, or leap to the conclusion that they must have somehow deserved this. But surely, what makes the recording so powerful, so painful, so thought-provoking and so much reblogged is the insight it offers into the mind of someone not so different, or at least unfamiliar, to many Tumblr users, in a situation so completely alien to, I sincerely hope, most of us? 

An adolescent presenting a blunted affect immediately after killing two family members is difficult to listen to, but not to understand. An individual listening to that and then commenting simply "what a psycho"? I find understanding that far harder. 

"One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic." - Attributed to Joseph Stalin, probably incorrectly.

The people who pick up the phone when the shit hits the fan for someone. No matter who the someone, the shit, or the fan, they answer the phone, and stay on the line, and follow the protocols, and try to discern the details, and... I'm not good at words.

The people whose problem it becomes whenever a problem is too much for whoever's problem it was in the first place. 

They're not the people who actually have to solve the problem, and I'm pretty sure in most systems the people answering the phone and trying to find out what the problem is aren't even the people who work out who has to go and solve the problem. They 'just' have to get the information. 

Having to talk to all the people whose problems have become emergencies, all day, every day? That's an incredibly hard job that gets a lot less acknowledgement than the people who get sent out to publicly and visibly deal with the problems. 

Emergency services operators, and dispatchers, deserve a whole world of cookies, hugs, appreciation and gratitude.