things I don't understand

[calimac]

1. What is the connection between Tiger Woods driving into a fire hydrant outside his home at 2:30 in the morning and confessing to having mistresses? He didn't have his mistress with him in the car. How did the one event lead to the other? I'm missing something here.

2. Why does everyone seem to consider it more reprehensible to burgle the home of dead people than the home of living people? The burglar says he didn't know they were dead. That makes it somehow OK, then?

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

They can't protect themselves because they weren't home, being dead. But if they'd been burgled earlier, they couldn't have protected themselves because they weren't home, being on vacation.

I sort of get the grave-robbing part, though the family is not being buried in their house, as far as I know. But I still don't get why it's worse to rob people of things they no longer have any use for, being dead, than to rob people who are alive and need the stuff, and for whom some things may be irreplaceable if of sentimental value.

The people it's actually worse for are the survivors, who now have to deal with a burglary on top of a tragedy, but it's not their feelings that the people so particularly offended by a burglary of the dead seem to be worried about.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

It's a visceral reaction that may be inexplicable if you yourself don't have that reaction. It is not a logical reaction at all, obviously.

I have two last thoughts, which is that people might have a subconscious reaction that robbing a dead person (or a dead person's home) is like a desecration of the body itself.

There's also the aspect of adding insult to injury: the implication of at least the first couple of articles I saw is that the burglars were actively looking for homes of the recently-dead to burglarize. Not to mention, the dead family, which included two children, died because of the reckless driving of a third party. So people are horrified by the apparent compounding of the tragedy AND by the crassness of the burglar's apparent approach. Something about not sporting.