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Sometimes you end up despairing about the human spirit. This week's provided me with an example of one of those times, after a colleague, who was working on some of the personal injury news you can read on this site, had been researching a horrific work injury in which a woman was killed by meat factory equipment.
And, aside from the generally sober, restrained and sensitive reports he'd found treating the work injury news respectfully, he'd come across a link to the story on a horror film company's website where people appeared to be revelling in the details.
It was not the film company workers that were posting this thoughtless response to a serious personal injury; it was a forum on their site where a handful of seemingly desensitized people were playing with the fact that one of the company's low-budget films had previously had a similar plot point.
To the film company's credit, they've removed that thread from the forum, although without any notice as to whether that was off their own bat or as a result of someone related to the industrial accident having contacted them.
It's not the first time we've come across dark jokes being made about unfortunate people as part of our no win, no fee work. There seems to be something that pushes young men - at least, judging by the screen names and pictures on the forums, it seems to be mostly young men - to avoid thinking too seriously about the physical and emotional pain and hardship that such an accident can cause.
But just because it's possible to understand why that response could be made to this situation, it doesn't mean it should be approved of. Yes, it's difficult to empathise directly with someone you've only ever met through the handful of words in a brief news flash, but not impossible. This means that making no attempt to do so is an attempt to reject your own abilities as a social creature and be satisfied with a small clique giggling at the misfortunes of those outside.
It's possible - although probably not likely, if I'm going to allow my pessimism out today - that having had their page taken down might make the jokers think twice before exploiting a serious work accident, or any other personal injury, as if it were a special effects shot.
The other end of this spectrum, at least for me, is EM Forster, best known perhaps for his call that we should "only connect". This profound hope, that we should "Live in fragments no longer", was expressed almost a century ago in Howards End, as was its shadow, the fear that "I believe we shall come to care about people less and less".
I want to believe in the hope side of that pairing; I'm sure, for all its hippy peace-out sound, that we can just get along eventually, and the more people that believe that with me the more likely it gets. And if the sensible real-world alternative involves admitting that laughing at other people's personal injury cases is a normal thing I should just get used to, I'd be tempted to keep living as if the ideal world were real anyway.
