Today I decided to do something with the quinces I bought. I seem to have forgotten Lime’s advice, so instead of just chopping them and putting them with sugar in a jar to ripen, I boiled them down in water with some sugar added. This, for some reason, was what I thought would make it ripen more quickly and become nice gooey tea base. We’ll see what happens in a month or two, I suppose.
Anyway, as I was peeling and chopping the fruit, I watched an episode of the TV show Dead Like Me, which I rather enjoy when I manage to download an episode. The basic idea is that most people, when they die, pass on to the other side a few short minutes after death… except that there still have to be reapers, people who go around helping people understand that they are in fact dead and that they need to let go and move on. Sometimes their job is as simple as pulling the soul out a few minutes early to spare the poor soul some suffering.
Anyway, in the episode I watched, a man sat chatting with an old woman as she waited for her body to actuall, officially die. She’d had a long career in music, singing jazz, but she was very obviously and unashamedly racist to a startling degree. At one point she actually said, “…the cutest little jigaboo babies!”
And it struck me that a bigotry like this, coming from a dead person, is even more pathetic than one coming from someone who is alive. Bigotry of any kind, really, looks quite pathetic when you look at how life turns out in the end. We all end up dead, basically. Whether we were of this or that faith (or none), regardless of what color (or mix of colors) one’s skin is, irrespective of one’s economic class and education, in the end we all are equalized by death.
How much more sad and pathetic do bigots look when one considers that much bigger picture. So very sad, really.