Crickey! I've lost perspective!

"I feel absolutely devastated because I actually feel the same way I felt - and I haven't felt like this in a long time - when Princess Diana had been killed. It's gut-wrenching."


So said a caller to the Australian Broadcasting Service after Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin was killed by a stingray.

Now, setting aside Steve Irwin... well, I can't say I was as impressed as others seemed to be. I suppose he was entertaining enough. But it's distressing the sort of footage that people sitting on couches in air-conditioned rooms desire, the first-person documentaries with someone putting themselves very much at risk. Animal Planet's  Austin Stevens nearly met the same fate from a cobra. Timothy Treadwell comes to mind as well.

But what strikes me here is this sort of vicarious grieving we've all come to love so much. The caller to the ABC is obviously imagining him or herself (I'm guessing it's ah him) in a great deal of distress. But it's faux-distress; it's grief-lite. There's no real loss to this person from the death of either celebrity. They're people from his television screen. They weren't involved in his life in any way. And they wouldn't have even noticed if his own brief candle had flickered out.

It's just a symptom of the disconnect, the incredible alienation from our communities: Dianna died nine years ago. In the course of decade, no one closer to him than two distant celebrities have died? No one in his community has suffered a gut-wrenching loss? Surely, in that time, people all around him suffered all sorts of calamities. While he (or she) was sitting inside with the air-conditioning on watching Diana retrospectives and wild animals getting harassed, real people were confronting the real issues of real lives all around him.

Maybe if he was a little more engaged with them, his life would be rich enough that he could get away from being devastated by his imaginary friends from the TV.