People, being social animals, are inclined to talk about highly publicized tragedies. In a dressage community, that means talking about the reported (and misreported) facts, the public behavior of the parties involved, and the potential explanations for an incident as tragic and widely reported as this incident involving dressage riders. There’s nothing inherently more sinister in participating in that than there is in lurking in those same conversations – both are driven by the same curiosity and sociality.
Has this event elicited some schadenfreude in a few posters? Probably? I don’t know. I don’t need to know or care or try to diagnose the hearts of other posters to follow the central conversation – which, outside of the minds of the pearl clutching cohort, is not about whether anyone deserved to be shot, but how a tragedy like this could ever possibly have come to pass (a question that depends on more than the moment the gun was fired).
What’s clear is that projecting an “agenda” or “gleeful handrubbing while trashing the victim” onto all who question whether the story has been pieced together accurately, or whether LK’s actions set in motion the sequence of events that culminated in this tragedy, is jumping to the same kind of assumptions and character judgments that you’re complaining that others are doing w.r.t. LK’s public behavior. And on the other hand, if you don’t come here looking for that malice “woven into the dialogue” it’s simply not there outside of a small set of outlandish posts.
It’s getting kind of comical to see people who are following a thread devoted to the discussion of a tragic situation protesting the fact that people are discussing a tragic situation.
