Today’s deep thought brought to you by flossing after dinner.
As often as we humans inseminate, cultivate, facilitate, propagate, maintain, resuscitate, elongate, and mandate the spark and expansion of life, we are also one motion away from being (in)voluntarily another person or creature’s harbinger of death. There isn’t a lone Grim Reaper; there are many and we all have the potential to (un)intentionally participate in the non-existence of another biological entity — and I don’t mean in instances of roadkill, the application of insecticides, or lethal self-defense.
When you disregard inclement weather, cardiac malfunction, being attacked by large land mammals or marine animals, and one’s own unwise decisions (out of desperation or sheer idiocy), what remains? Somebody meets an untimely end because of someone else’s negligence, premeditation, or the most potent, so-not-funny dark comedy of errors.
If you can die because of another person’s behavior (with or without a series of very unwanted events), someone else can also die because of your behavior (with or without a series of very unwanted events). Most of us wouldn’t purposefully be the unwitting enablers of a stranger’s manner of expiration, right? Being an “ethical” and efficient vigilante is cost-prohibitive unless you’re Batman and socially isolating even if you were Batman (you shouldn’t let too many people know about your secret identity).
Is it bewildering that on the surface, ideating, preparing, and conjuring the beginning and continuation of a presence requires much more focused intent, whereas, ushering in an absence doesn’t even need your (immediate) awareness of it? I think not. The butterfly effect of your actions applies to both growth and decomposition. The conversation you had with that electrician could be one or five degrees removed from his co-producing an heir. At the same time, that conversation could be one or five degrees removed from his deviating from his post-work routine, thus, putting him in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We all have this non-gift within us. How would any of us know that we haven’t already dabbled in such morbidity? I guess we’re all in a young adult fantasy novel whether we like it or not.
PS. Can you imagine Minority Report having a sequel where people can be prosecuted for being the initation point of a person’s death? Would law-abiding citizens have to purchase “initiation point immunity” so that if something they say or do ever leads to someone’s loss of life, they can’t be arrested, charged, or prosecuted? Maybe different states would have their own threshold of degrees-removed that must not be exceeded in order for a conviction to be won.
Original pic cred: Mathieu Stern @mathieustern, Timothy Dykes @timothycdykes, unsplash
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