My Thoughts on the Two Australian DJs in Trouble Over a Prank Call Suicide

Most of you by now have heard the story of Michael Christian and Mel Greig, two Australian DJs who prank called the hospital at which Kate Middleton stayed due to pregnancy complications last week. “Posing” as the Queen (the voice Greig used was about as believable as me calling the Four Seasons Hotel using an Amos ‘n Andy Kingfish voice and proclaiming “I am be Tiga Woods! Gives me yo’ finest suites and five of yo’ loosest white womens!”), the pair managed to get through to the room of Kate Middleton and speak for a few minutes to her nurse before ending the call. Tragically, days later, Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who put the duo’s call through to Kate’s room, was found dead, an apparent suicide. Christian and Greig have since been suspended, their show cancelled and the station they work for pledging the year’s remaining advertizing income to a memorial fund for Saldanha. Justice has been served, right? No. No it hasn’t.

Let’s pretend that the Queen didn’t have 007 assassinate Saldanha and she actually killed herself as a result of the humiliation she felt falling for a DJ’s prank call. Is the blood of her horrible decision on the hands of the duo who called her? Consider this scenario: A guy finally works up the courage to ask out a girl he really likes. She summarily rejects him. He later goes home and hangs himself. Does that mean all women need to say yes from here on out because one man had a horribly disproportionate reaction to the pain he was feeling? Of course not. And yet, because of a prank call gone awry, two DJs have lost their livelihoods, a station might go bankrupt, and the public is clamoring for more consequences because the world has become a cesspool of knee-jerk appeasement.

If you doubt me on that, consider the message of all the recent anti-bullying efforts, which glorify kids who have taken their lives because of what? They were called a faggot? A bunch of black kids beat them while screaming “honky,” or a car full of white kids shouted “nigger” at them? The “it gets better” slogan does nothing more than teach “Yes, suicide is TOTALLY an appropriate reaction to these things, but hold on, because, in a few years, your will stop encountering anything that makes you sad and you’ll never contemplate killing yourself again!”

Guess what, kids: It doesn’t get better. It gets worse. It gets way, way worse. Do you know what’s in store after school? Work. Bills. Taxes. Existential crisis. Questions about your mortality. Watching your body and face age and break down like a pumpkin after Halloween. Heartbreak. Children that hate you and blame you for all their problems. Pets dying. Parents dying. Getting fired. And those are just the options I picked that could be sung to the opening of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” You’re in store for so very much that wants to chew you up, break you down and take away everything you have worked towards and stand for. That’s life.

What needs to be taught is a sense of unshakable inner stability. You cannot control your surroundings, only your reactions to them. The world needs to stop making a carnival of people like Jacintha Saldanha who make horrible decisions in moments of emotional crisis. Had her response been to find and kill the two DJs who embarrassed her, everyone would be in agreement that she was unstable and the two entertainers doing their job were clearly not at fault. Yet, because she murdered herself, a massive debate has ensued regarding “when a joke crosses the line.”

I’ve run out of words on the topic, and will leave you with the life wisdom of two men far greater than myself: Don Corleone and DMX. They tell it like it is, a precious commodity these days.