Normally when someone dies you feel a sense of loss. Even if you don’t know that person, there’s still some kind of impact, as it remains a life that has ended. This is especially true if it’s a young person, as you also have the spectre of potential unfulfilled, a full and complete life ahead of them that they will never have the chance to experience. This is, somehow, not true when one contemplates the 22 year old from Maine who died last week trying to set fireworks off from his head.
I don’t want to say he deserved death, because that’s a harsh judgement. If he got what he deserved he’d still be injured, because you’re still talking about someone who thought it would be a great idea to launch fireworks from his body, burns are at a minimum required for that kind of grievous stupidity. That’s only because injury is seemingly the only way the terminally stupid will learn. If they can’t deduce that fire is hot, then burns are a lesson that would remind him, and potentially prevent more fireworks related injury in the future. Death also prevents any fireworks related injuries of course, but then launching fireworks from your head is easily the least intelligent way to do what has to be the least intelligent act that someone is going to attempt.
There will naturally be people who want to see fireworks sales banned in the wake of this, especially fireworks which are powerful enough to kill a man. But this isn’t the case of children getting into them and hurting themselves, this is a grown man who, arguably, should have known better. If someone can’t deduce that starting your head on fire is dangerous, and possibly fatal, should we even be all that worried about their eventual, inevitable demise? If it’s not fireworks, they will just end themselves in another equally foolhardy manner. The person in question strapped explosives onto his head, on purpose, and lit them on fire. There is nothing you can do to save him.
There are a lot of warning labels in the world, whether warning of obvious dangers or those which are a bit more subtle. It sometimes seems like the sheer number of such labels can lead to people becoming a lot less cognizant of actual danger. But the lesson here is that they exist for a reason, while it might be obvious to most of us that sticking your hand into a fan, drinking poison or starting your head on fire is a bad plan, there are people in the world who haven’t quite figured that out. If they continue to ignore the obvious warnings, is there anything we can do to save them? Or should we just let them go, shake our head, and admit that some people just aren’t equipped to make it in this world.
It is somewhat sad that this man is going out in a blaze of mockery, right after going out in a significantly more literal blaze of actual fire. Any sense of guilt I might have is assuaged by the fact that he did this to himself, on purpose, for reasons that might be lost to the mists of time but can generally be assumed to be quite stupid. If there is a lesson here, it’s not about treating fireworks with respect, because most people already do that. Instead, the lesson here is that there is no stopping some people from harming themselves through aggressively stupid acts and maybe we shouldn’t even bother trying.
