Former Toronto mayor Rob Ford died of cancer after a widely publicized struggle with drug and alcohol addiction.
Across the Internet and media, punchlines have largely been replaced by dignified tributes, and crude caricatures by staid, objective reporting. Why? Because Rob Ford, alive as an alcoholic, was apparently less deserving of compassion and understanding than Rob Ford, now dead from cancer.
True, the fond remembrances and generous consolations are heartening, refreshing expressions of decency towards a family in grieving, and yes, they should be acknowledged and welcomed as such. To be clear, however, they are also the indisputable byproduct of the type of image makeover nobody wants — a cancer diagnosis.
Fueling Ford's trajectory from viciously mocked to politely mourned, his cancer demonstrated how malleable our emotional responses are in light of our moralizations. Rob Ford was, after all, a man who suffered from two life-threatening diseases but garnered sympathy for only one. Perhaps that dichotomy is worth us, as a society, examining.
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