Does it make me a bad person...

...if I tell you when I heard early this morning that Sean Taylor had passed away, my second thought was (After "That's a shame."), "That's going to be hard on the 'Skins. Could it help the Lions make the playoffs?"

I know, I know... It's awful, and I'm a terrible person. Hey, I'm being honest. As terrible as Taylor's death is for his family and teammates, and my condolences go out to them, as a person with troubles of my own, it had no effect on me whatsoever. Call me jaded, call me hard boiled, call me a jerk, call me an ass, call me a realist, but the news didn't do anything to me emotionally.

Should I feel any worse for Taylor than someone who gets shot, for example, in a car jacking in Detroit? Both are tragic in their own way. But with the 24/7 news cycle, an athlete's death will be treated as tragic, with the athlete being beatified (Deservedly or not, just look at the reaction to the death Kirby Puckett), while the death of a non-celebrity gets a few paragraphs below the fold in the local paper. It doesn't mean that life was less important, or the victim was any less of a person, does it?

The world can be a awfully shitty place, where bad things happen to both good and bad people. From all accounts, Sean Taylor was a little of both. And in this world, sometimes you're in the wrong place, at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing. Sorry to say, that's what happened to Taylor in his confronting a gun wielding thief with a machete.

I wouldn't wish the fate of being shot in the leg, then bleeding to death on anyone. But other than his being an good NFL player with a well-earned reputation for finding trouble, thus my knowing who Taylor was, it has nothing to do with my life. If I was a fan of the Redskins or Hurricanes, I'm sure I'd feel differently.

But I'm not, and I don't.