- I hate that anyone gets cancer, but this feels a bit like kama…. (sic)
- Karma always comes around
- I thought she died about 5 or so years ago.
- karma ran over her dogma
- Esther joins Dignitas. I didn’t think the transfer window was open until January
- So soon after taking the miracle jabs? This can’t be.
There are plenty more comments like this. I just selected a few of them to get your Wednesday morning off to a great start. The last comment, dripping with sarcasm and malice, rather gives away what this is all about. Rantzen was strong on the Covid vaccines, commenting that those who refused them should stay at home rather than attend hospital if they felt ill. Now that she is seriously ill with lung cancer, the anti-vaxxers are having fun. Without getting into a debate as to whether vaccines are a good thing or not – fact: they are absolutely a good thing – this is a salutary reminder that, to misquote Ian Dury, there ain’t half been some evil bastards.
Imagine thinking, and then saying under a cowardly anonymous handle, that someone dying of cancer is karma, that someone actually deserves to die because of something they said about crackpot anti-vaxxers? And the conclusion from one that “the miracles jabs” could not stop someone dying from a totally unrelated condition – well, what a thing to make a joke out of.
Let he (or she) without sin cast the first stone and all that and yes, I have said and done some stupid things over the years, something you will immediately recognise if you have read my blog, and I spent a considerable amount of time apologising for stuff that happened often many years ago.But I never once gloated about someone dying of cancer and certainly never told “jokes” about it. I don’t always know where “the line” is but I have never crossed one like this.
I can’t imagine writing something like that, either. I post on X under my own name, which in itself comes with responsibilities because I do care what people think of me. If people don’t like my digs, often quite spiteful digs, directed to certain politicians and media outlets (and yes, certain media outlet users too, because I believe they are fair game), but I don’t want them to die from cancer, or from anything else.
I am far from being a fan of Esther Rantzen and subscribe, at least in part, to the views of the late, great Victor Lewis-Smith in his newspaper pieces like this. And while he certainly strayed quite near “the line”, there was certainly more than a grain of truth in what he said. Rantzen made a very good living from taking the piss out of people on shows like the wretched That’s Life, but Lewis-Smith stopped short of asserting that her likely death was somehow karma.
Perhaps social media has invented a nastier, more mean country, but in truth I think not. I was once a part of a world in which I shared loathsome sick “jokes” with like-minded friends and acquaintances and just because we shared filth in a closed environment doesn’t make it right. So I am, genuinely sorry, for that, as for everything else I got wrong in my life.
Full disclosure: I did celebrate privately with Champagne when Margaret Thatcher died. I doubt that I shall shed a tear when Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and especially Rupert Murdoch pop their clogs. But I’d like to think I won’t become as hateful as those anonymous social media trolls who are seemingly without conscience or filter and hide behind the vomit-stained cloak of invisibility.
