Amen
I'm not sure one comment is enough to convict Ms. Daniels of being an airhead.
Remember the story about the wealthy Arab sheik whose kid wanted a Mickey Mouse outfit for his birthday - so he bought him MSNBC.
Great Clint Eastwood quote from Unforgiven.
Good, well-reasoned take down of a pompous media elitist.
The "airhead" in this story is "Katie", the letter-writer.
She says no one should boycott Aruba just because Natalie Holloway was "careless" in a foreign country. I don't think the proposed boycott is based on Ms. Holloway missing her flight of misplacing her luggage. Instead, it seems she almost undoubtedly was murdered, and most probably by a spoiled rich kid whose daddy happens to be an apprentice judge in Aruba. The prosecutor's office is quoted as saying--on the QT-- "How can I do this to my best friend's son?" In any event, it is clear that the investigation is bungled through outright ineptitude or intentional malfeasance.
Perhaps if some of those beach front hotels reported a sharp dip in yankee dollars flowing in, word would come down to put someone competent and honest in charge of the case.
"Did victim Spady deserve to die as a result of consuming 30 to 40 beers and vodka drinks in 11 hours? The answer is a simple no."
Let's define deserve, first. My reading is that if you "deserve" something, it means that you are worthy or of merit, that you've earned something as a result of effort or action. If you don't "deserve" it, then, you haven't earned it as a result of effort or action, you've acquired that something randomly or unfairly.
And by her actions, by golly, yes, she DESERVED to die. If you point a gun at your head and pull the trigger, you DESERVE to get a bullet in your head.
"But, did Spady contribute to, and share responsibility for, her own demise? The answer is a simple yes."
Contributed to her demise? Shared responsibility for her demise? No, she WAS responsible, and wholly so. She did not have a single soul force feeding her. That people cheerled her on is irrelevant to the fact that SHE KILLED HERSELF. If you threaten to jump off a bridge and block traffic, that I yell at you to jump and get it over with so I can get to work, does not make me culpable if you DO jump. You're the damn fool who did it.
"Did Spady’s parents and friends deserve her death? Was it fair? No, No and No."
This "no, no, and no" is a tad more ambiguous, but here's a question: were they making her do it? Did they help her to do it? Did they have any effect on the crappy reasoning skills that led her to think she could shoot down 30 to 40 beers and vodka drinks in 11 hours and SURVIVE? If the answer to THESE questions is YES, YES, and YES, then hell, yeah, they DESERVED it. They earned it as a result of their inability to inculcate in her common sense and failure to discourage her stupidity. These kids who were evidently so desperate for friendship they threw away their own lives to be accepted, their parents are encouraged to blame others for the passing of their kids, when the legal culpability, should lie squarely on the shoulders of their children, and the moral culpability should lie squarely on those parents who raised a child so bereft of self-esteem and common sense that they had to play the drunken fool to keep their ego from being shattered entirely.
After all, who deserves the finger pointed more? The kids who egged them on? Do the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders deserve to cover losses when the Cowboys fail to meet the spread? Do Laker Girls get fired willy-nilly when Kobe goes into a slump? I don't think so.
Fairness is something you can expect...from your mommy. Justice is what the law is supposed to give you, not what you deserve or what's fair. If the law really gave people what they deserved or what was fair, then everyone could expect to be in jail a long time for all those times we broke it speeding or committing other minor infractions and nobody caught us, or all those times we conspired in our heads to kill that SOB who ticked us off, or rob that bank when we're broke, for the sheer joy of imagining it. As the old toast goes, "May we all get what we want, as long as we DON'T get what we DESERVE."
[/end rant]