h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Facebook is still going fairly mental over Thatcher's death and it's quite interesting to watch it ebb and flow between the left and the right. One point that is being made over and over is that it's not okay to welcome someone's death and it's raised some interesting things for me.

I think it is okay to welcome someone's death, I think there are people out there whose behaviour was so harmful that their deaths can only come as a relief for those who suffered because of them. I'm really stuck on the borderline with Thatcher as to whether I feel that over her - I think I'm mostly coming down on the side of 'no' but it's a close-run thing - but I know with absolute certainty there are people who I will unambiguously be happy to see dead.

Today has been quite interesting as it's almost been a test run for when my dad dies: I now have experience of someone I absolutely hate dying. When my dad goes (assuming he hasn't already - could have for all I know) I'll feel good, I'll feel relieved. I won't be popping champagne or anything, nor dancing on his grave, but I think I'll have a nice drink satisfied the world is a better place because he's no longer in it. I don't think that makes me a bad person and I don't think it's wrong.

Seeing all these people say you shouldn't celebrate death has really had me thinking. I'm not being arrogant or anything, but I can't help but feel they're just wrong and naive. I've wanted to say something but facebook is too public and I'd have made a show of myself. So I'm writing it up here, because I did need to write about it and properly think about what I'm thinking, feeling and writing. Plus you lot are already used to me making a show of myself

I don't think I like the idea of celebrating someone's death, no matter how much harm or hurt they did you.

When my mom got sick I was a little messed up, because I had to come to terms with the fact that we'd never have a mother-daughter relationship in anything resembling a normal sense. I didn't care all that much when she died, to the extent of actually grieving, but I did feel bad for her sickness and suffering. I don't miss her. There's nothing there to miss - I avoided her as much as I could while she was alive. But I'd never say the world was a better place for not having her in it. My world, perhaps, but there were people who liked, loved, and cared for her, whatever their reasons. And I'll always pity her (especially as her religion ruined her life and alienated her family, leaving her a very bitter woman for most of her adult life), and I still feel a void where a mother should have been.

Thatcher didn't sound like a very nice person at all, and I have to admit being incensed at articles I read today which touted her as a feminist. Sorry, feminist =/= hardass. Feminist = not misogynist. But I think that her death is more of a catalyst for this entry than the point.

HI I think there has been an interesting movement over the Thatcher thing and it has gone from (or maybe it's just me, I'm not sure) "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" through an acknowledgement that she was divisive, to further outlining the policies that did make her so divisive and are the reason so many people hated, and hate, her even now.

If she had died in 1990 or very soon after leaving No 10 I could probably be more understanding of the "dancing about on her grave singing halleluia" but she has been out of the public eye for so long it feels a bit... I don't know. Overblown? It's probably similar to how PC feels about her mum?

But what needs to happen, MUST happen is for people to remember that anger, harness those feelings and give Cameron and his crew their very own Poll Tax Moment.

Someone mentioned elsewhere when I asked why the Brits aren't out on the streets, that they are worried about kettling and the police powers these days.

That's even more reason to protest, surely?

(can I just say: "making a show of myself"?? you can take the boy out of Liverpool and all that I haven't heard that since I was in the Army, and I can still remember the first time I heard it in RL - rather than, say, on Brookie)