If you've been on Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, or Facebook the past few days, you've probably seen the same heavy-handed moralizing I have. It's all over the place. Some people die, and suddenly people are very proud to have opinions. 

I'm talking about the one-two punch of the Norway bombing and Amy Winehouse checking out for good. Like any violent death, both are tragedies in their own right. (Self-inflicted violence is still violence. Winehouse's was a violent death, however prolonged the violence.) And yet, perhaps predictably, I've seen all sorts of high horses trotting around the web. Comments about how no one should mourn the newest addition to the forever 27 club because Norwegian children also died recently and they take precedence in our pop culture attention span. 

I'm a little confused as to why we have to prioritize. Why we have to take sides. Can't we be bummed about Norway and also about Amy Winehouse? Are we really thinking like news media, with only a few slots for top stories available in our brains? Why is it one or the other? 

More importantly, why do we use the deaths of others to feel more important than other people? It gives us a smug sense of self-satisfaction to care about what we consider to be the more important tragedy. We look at those mourning the singer, turn our noses up a little, and think, "well, I'm not that shallow. I'm sad about Norwegian children." 

People appropriate tragedy for their own sense of self-worth. It's nothing new. It's just more public now that all our opinions, thoughts, and arguments are more public. Picking the right worldly concerns has always been a bourgeois pastime. I've seen people have similar arguments over various kinds of activism. "Save the whales? I'm too busy being comfortably distressed by the situation in Darfur." 

When you're at a safe distance from tragedy, no matter how big or small it is, no matter the death count, it's easy to use it to feel better about yourself. The majority of people tweeting and posting about the recent slew of publicized deaths have nothing at all to do with them. Having heard "Rehab" a number of times on the radio does not make you a friend of Amy Winehouse. Hating terrorism on principle does not make you a relative of one of the Oslo victims. 

But these stories affect us anyway, often sincerely, when we have nothing to prove by waving around our empathy. They get to us because they're reminders of the fragility of human existence. Amy Winehouse could be that friend you have with the drug problem. Someone you know could be a victim of the next school shooting. Chaos is all around us, and it claims many for its own. It's not wrong to feel sadness at the distant symbols of the forever-hungry madness of the world. 

It's a little silly to tweet about how we shouldn't feel sad that a young woman succumbed to an ongoing battle with self-harm because other people died as well. They're equal cause for feeling, for abstract mourning. Playing the news like it's a game just makes you look like a self-serving, competitive hyper-tweeter. Let's not let the open opinion channels undermine our capacity for empathy. Just because we can compete on the internet doesn't mean we should. Sometimes it's enough just to reflect.