J'Accuse

Kevin Whitrick, 42, of Shropshire England, hanged himself last night. Nobody would have cared, I expect. Except that he did it live on webcam.

Still, you have to read way down into the last couple of paragraphs of any of the nerwspaper stories to get any inkling of why he might have done it. His ex-wife helpfully says he was in an accident “in July 2006,” “and he never fully recovered.”

So that was the reason, right? That would explain it. A practical matter of ending physical pain, perhaps.

It couldn’t possibly have been that his marriage broke down a year ago—before the car accident—and he was living alone, while his two daughters were living with their mother. And he was, I expect, besides the pain of not seeing his own children, saddled with heavy alimony and child-support payments. Quite possibly, given the British courts, payments he could not possibly afford, and could not escape even by bankruptcy. No, not a hint of this possibility in any of the stories. Yet this is a very common story, in the UK as in Canada or the US. Indeed, it is the story of almost any man who has been divorced by his wife over the past several decades. And many, many, middle-aged man have committed suicide before him for just this reason.

But we don’t care if a man dies. That’s the bottom line. We do not care about male suffering.

Indeed, that “very serious accident,” coming only a few months after the breakup—couldn’t that have been an earlier suicide attempt? But not a hint of the possibility in any of the news accounts.

Nah—no chance. After all, men don’t have feelings, right? Or if they do, they have no business having them. They are only here to shut up at take what they’re given, right?

I hope Kevin Whitrick did not die in vain. But I expect he did. It will take more than thousands upon thousands of suicides to make society fairer to men, to fathers, and to their children. Because we have already had that, and things are still just getting worse.

Winston Churchill, who knew something of holocausts, once wrote, “There is no virtue in a tame acquiescence in evil. To protest against cruelty and wrong, and to strive to end them, is the mark of a man."

Today, that is an indictment of all of us.