Am I the only person that is tired of seeing the word tragedy used to describe situations that aren't tragic? It's like the word hero. Not everyone is a fucking hero. And not every car crash and cancer diagnosis is tragic. Let me see if I can help illuminate the difference.
When teenagers or college students get drunk and kill themselves or their friends in a collision, it's NOT TRAGIC. They fucking knew better. Every school teaches kids that drunk driving is stupid. Every school and every alert parent tells their kids never to get into a car with a person who's been drinking. So when they do it and end up dead it's not tragic. They were being stupid. And when you do stupid things, don't be surprised when stupid things happen.
When you build your house on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean and your house then falls into the ocean it's NOT TRAGIC. Are you retarded? The house has nowhere to go but over the edge. And you do not control the ocean or the weather. So whenever I see this on the news, I laugh.
When you smoke for 30 years and get lung cancer it's NOT TRAGIC. You're stupid. You have no one to blame but yourself and no one should feel bad for you. You knew the risk and you should accept the consequences. So don't come crying to the news station to do a story about your "tragic situation". Fuck you.
When a drunk driver kills OTHER drivers, that IS TRAGIC, particularly when that person walks away with no injuries. Those people were killed because of another person's idiocy, not their own. They had no control over the situation. So you empathize with them. This also applies to situations in which people kill or injure other people because they can't be bothered to slow down in fog, ice, snow, heavy rain, or any situation where common sense tells you to slow down.
When a natural disaster happens and you're too poor to afford to leave the area you're in (a la New Orleans) or live in an area that is too poor to have facilities for early warning (a la Indonesia 2004) IT'S TRAGIC. When the government then fails to help the affected citizens, IT'S TRAGIC. Notice the pattern. When you have control over your situation and choose to do something dumb, it's not tragic when you get fucked up. When you have no control over the situation and other people are responsible for what happens to you, I'll empathize with you.
As a last example, when your house burns because your Christmas tree caught on fire, it's NOT TRAGIC. Every year, there are more than 10,000 fires across this country on the three days from Dec. 24-26, a large number of them due to trees. That should tell you not to bring a dry, dead tree into your home and surround it with electrical wires. So I don't feel bad when your house burns down.
If people just used a modicum of common sense, there would be far less need to describe any situation as tragic in the first place.
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