These posts bother me for a number of reasons that I'm about to outline here.
1.) Claiming people are stupid, poorly informed, or otherwise wrong for mourning celebrity deaths and not mourning deaths of those they believe have contributed more to society is inherently a flawed argument. Celebrities are not famous for dying, they are famous for living. Suggesting that other non-famous persons deaths should be recognized and honored instead of celebrities' deaths is a comparison of apples and oranges. What we are mourning when we mourn celebrity deaths is the ending of a life that we were familiar with. Those who were familiar with non-famous persons' lives certainly mourn those people. There are simply a larger amount of people that are familiar with celebrities, leading to a naturally higher amount of mourners.
2.) As distasteful as the chastisers find the public mourning the death of celebrities instead of the death of people whose lives they subjectively believe were more important, I find it equally distasteful that the chastisers pick and choose which deaths they believe are "more important" than others. What they don't realize is that while blaming us for putting one death "above" another, they are doing the exact same thing. There is no universal criteria for who deserves to be mourned after they die, and who doesn't.
3.) These posts all indicate that your life is somehow validated by the number of Facebook posts and tweets about you when you die. Is this really what it's all come down to? Was a soldier's death truly "wasted" because I didn't tweet about it? Was Paul Walker's life truly of higher value because I did tweet about it?
“We're all human, aren't we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”
-J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
