A
thirty-two-year-old woman is killed while updating her Facebook status behind
the wheel of a moving car, and the Internet is flooding with opinions.
Reactions span
everywhere from “She deserves a Darwin award” to “How would YOU like your
entire life to be judged based on one mistake?”
Talk about
extremes. One could rationally argue that Facebooking while driving is more a deliberate
choice than a “mistake,” but I can understand the sentiment behind it: no one wants to be
remembered solely for the wrongs they committed. Our lives should be more than cautionary tales.
But I have to
wonder if the same amount of compassion would be shown if the truck driver she
hit was critically injured or killed. Or if she plowed into a family’s minivan
and killed all the children inside.
Then she’d be a
monster. Right?
This idea of how we
define “good” and “bad,” especially when the person in question is deceased and
cannot redeem or justify their actions, appeals to me because it’s the primary topic
in my upcoming book. Where There’s Smoke
is full of flawed characters who want to believe they are good. And they do try;
but the ways they go about proving themselves make others scratch their heads
at best, and feel betrayed at worst. It’s a story that asks: who are we really?
Are we the sum of all our actions? Is the note we finish our lives on the most
defining of them all?
There are no right
or wrong ways to answer this question, and that’s what I love about it.
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