Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 12:35:02 +0800
Subject: Re: living obituaries, Lisa Rogers, &c


Being new to the list I didn't know Lisa nor communicate with her, nor have
I posted to the list previously, being content to read what others are
writing.

But the series and exchanges on Lisa's death, obituary, are too depressing.
All I can say is god help marxism and the socialist future if this is what
committed marxists are like.

Just about every post is narcissistic, self-centred - focusing on "me", "my
grief", "what right did her family have to leave out all those bits in the
obit", etc. How truly American?!

Most offensive of all were the ones about her family and the obituary -
surely her family have every right to remember her the way they wish, with
their grief every bit as deep. They may not have liked her politics or
whatever, but remember, at the end of the day, grieving is for the living,
not the dead. And like it or not, at the end of the day, she was their
daughter. And in a "traditional" community which, for all its shortcomings
and conservatism, has its great virtues too; virtues which Marx, towards
the end of his life (indeed, even in parts of the manifesto), acknowledged,
if indirectly, by his thoughts on Russia in the letters to Vera Zasulich.

Surely marxists should have bigger generosity of heart.

One can only recall the passage in Reed's Ten Days when the assembly broke
into the Russian funeral song to remember their dead comrades. Not "I this"
or "I that", etc. Just a vast outpouring of sorrow and grief, expressed not
in political slogans, and what-not, but in time-honoured pan-human fashion.

No flames, please. Just grief that one of what seems to be an increasingly
smaller breed has died.

KJin




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