<<<Life & death ain't fair, but our reactions to them tell us a lot
about our own priorities as a society. What they say here is not so nice, and might be taken as an indication that some priorities could do with a change. >>>
Your priorities tell you that because one of the three who died worked for an investment bank and was a businesswoman she was worth more to society than the others.
And you know very little about what the other two did with their lives, and you know next to nothing about what kind of individuals any of the the three were, really. We know the most about John Kennedy, and what we know, or feel we know, is that he was a very decent, kind person who lived a relatively unassuming life (style; I can't bear to write the two words together!) and did many unpublicized good works. I suspect he lived much the life you would have lived if you found yourself rich tomorrow! He loved kayaking, for one thing! And white water rafting! (He was known for showing up at board meetings at which everyone else show up in a limo on his 10-speed bike.)
And the fact that millions of people felt close to one of the three individuals, having followed the lives of him and his family since he was a baby, and did not know the other two, or barely knew one and didn't know the other, is being brushed aside by you, and "because of who his father was" is being substituted for that fact.
And you are proposing that when human beings die, one should 'grade' them for mourning-worthiness, and proposing that one give the deceased a high mourning-grade not according to whether one had, or felt one had (the same thing, emotionally) a connection to, a long familiarity with, that person, but according to whether s/he was a successful bi-lingual international capitalist or wasn't.
At least that's what you have done yourself. A completely capitalist emotional calculus is being employed by you and offered as an improvement on the sentimentalist one now being exploited by the media.
Look, it's simple: The reason Lauren Gail Bissette was not mourned in a way reflective of her greater 'worth' to society, as judged by you according to your reading of her accomplishments in big business in China and having learned Chinese-as-a-second-language, was because she was unknown to, and therefore had not made her way into the hearts of, the mourners at issue. This was not true of Kennedy, and it was only somewhat less true of her sister.
[Edit: I know you didn't mean this; but it's what you said, essentially. I know I'm being tendentious, though.]
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