Posted on 08/23/2014 12:59:38 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Henry Rollins slams Robin Williams for committing suicide: 'How in the heck could you possibly do that to your children?'
The hardcore rocker and spoken word artist doesn't mince his words when it comes to Williams' Aug. 11 suicide, suggesting that the 40,000 people who commit suicide each year in this country 'are 40,000 people who blew it.'
Hardcore rocker Henry Rollins is being branded as a punk for criticizing Robin Williams in his weekly newspaper column.
The former Black Flag frontman and self-proclaimed Williams fan slammed the late comic actor for committing suicide and "traumatizing" his three children in the process.
"I simply cannot understand how any parent could kill themselves," Rollins wrote in his Thursday piece for LA Weekly's West Coast Sound Blog.
""How in the hell could you possibly do that to your children....choosing to kill yourself, rather than to be there for that child, is every shade of awful, traumatic and confusing."
Williams committed suicide Aug. 11 in his California home, leaving behind three adult children and millions of distraught fans. The 63-year-old actor, who won an Academy Award for his turn in "Good Will Hunting," had suffered from depression and addiction for years — and had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
"I think as soon as you have children, you waive your right to take your own life," Rollins wrote. "No matter what mistakes you make in life, it should be your utmost goal not to traumatize your kids. "
But Rollins, whose biggest hit is an empowerment dirge titled “Low Self Opinion,” didn't stop there, saving his harshest words for all tortured artists who chose to end their lives prematurely .
Pictured in 2004 are, from right, Robin Williams, daughter Zelda, wife Marcia, and sons Cody and Zac.
"I no longer take this person seriously," Rollins wrote about artists who took their own lives. "I may be able to appreciate what he or she did artistically but it's impossible to feel bad for them."
And taking that logic further: "Almost 40,000 people a year kill themselves in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention," he added. In my opinion, that is 40,000 people who blew it."
Those words incited plenty of reaction on social media, particularly from critics who felt Rollins was the one who blew it.
"Henry Rollins threatening to stop taking suicides seriously will be a serious disincentive for the four people who still take him seriously," tweeted music writer Sam Adams.
Rollins’ flap comes after Kiss frontman Gene Simmons drew boos for harsh comments about suicide.
Rollins' controversial diatribe comes on the heels of a major backlash over Kiss bassist Gene Simmons' controversial comments on depression.
"Drug addicts and alcoholics are always, 'the world is a harsh place.' My mother was in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, I don't want to hear X all about 'the world is a harsh place,'" Simmons told the music site Songsfact.com. ""And for a putz, 20-year-old kid to say, 'I'm depressed, I live in Seattle,' X you, then kill yourself."
Though the interview had initially been published two weeks before Williams' suicide, it went viral after the tragedy drew a spotlight on depression.
Simmons later apologized for his ill-timed remarks.
Yes...what you said...my father’s father committed suicide when he was 14...my father was an only child...I didn’t know until in my 30 ‘ s after my father had died...suicide can affect families for generations...Knowing more could have explained A LOT of things for me as a kid growing up.
For a while our small town was getting a reputation for teens committing suicide. Part of the problem was that when the first two did it they were memorialized in an over the top way and it seemed to glamorize the act.
Actually, it’s multiple studies, but you are free to expand your anecdote into a scientific theory, instead, if you wish.
Can you say, “publicity stunt?” I knew you could.
Poor Henry.
“How about being involved with the murder of Dennis Cole’s son?”
What are you implying or claiming?
When Henry first came out from DC to California to be in Black Flag he never talked.
That wore off. He’s made a career out of never shutting up.
My daughter is a paramedic. She and her driver went on a 911 call where a young teenager had hung himself in the bathroom. My daughter performed CPR on him all the way to the hospital, but he never made it - the ER doctor declared him dead. She lost it in the ER (she has a son the same age), and the nurses all comforted her. Her partner told my daughter she did her very best - they just didn’t get to him soon enough. It was a bitter lesson for a young EMT to learn.
Point is, suicide doesn’t just affect family members, it can also affect the emergency responders.
Thank you. I appreciate your kind words.
God Bless you and yours as well!
I agree. Whether doing right or wrong, our actions touch lives. We should all act accordingly.
Some people are just never going to get it. They think you can will yourself out of it. For people who have it really bad you can’t. The advice they give is appropriate for mild depression: get out more, think of others, be grateful, act cheerful. For someone who is at 12 on a scale of 1-10 such advice is meaningless. If they had to live 5 minutes in your head they’d be screaming. Stay strong, FRiend.
Henry, suicide is by definition almost never a rational, let alone malicious, choice. While we’re on the subject, you lecturing Robin on rational? Pure comedy.
There is often a revenge aspect to suicide.
It makes no sense but it’s true.
Crap, sorry to hear that. It’s far from obvious at the time how doing such an act affects others...but there’s not much a person can do, short of taking the lives of innocent people, that can be more hurtful. A grandfather is a grandfather - if he did 20 years for robbing a bank when he was young, so be it, by the time he has grandchildren, who cares - those kids have a granddad. There’s a LOT to live for in this world, and very little worth dying (early) for.
There is no “level 12” on a scale of 1 - 10.
These ridiculous Bill Paxton (Aliens), responses are very telling. Earlier in the thread someone said “depression eats your brain”. Utter baloney.
As I stated before, I have been “there”. Not depression, but the despair and bottomless pain that makes you feel dead.
Many of us get it.
But given my experiences, I now know that suicide is never the correct or humane answer.
Stop thinking about oneself.
Stop focusing on “feelings”.
Start DOING what is right.
I could go on and on.
Hyper focusing on your personal problems and afflictions almost never fixes them.
Instead focus on and DO what is right. God gave us internal instincts on right and wrong. Turn to the Bible for guidance and strength.
These are not easy to do if one is in the habit of self doubt and self pity. But the benefits make it worth the change.
I think you mean Salina, Kansas. Salinas is in California.
"I think it’s great for two people to be together. That is a good number. I think, that to keep it alive though, you can’t spend every day together. It wears out the magic, Love means nothing to me if it’s not fortified with fierce, painful longing, brief explosive instances of furious passion and intimacy and then a sad parting for a time. In that way, you can give your life to it and still have a life of your own.
I think some couples spend too much time together. They flatten out the potential for experience by constant closeness. Passion builds over time like steam. Let it rage until it’s exhausted and then leave it alone to let it build up again. Why can’t love be insane and distorted? How can it be vital if it has the same threshold as normal day-to-day experience? Why can’t you write burning letters and let your nocturnal self smolder with desire for one who is not there? Why not let the days before you see her be excruciating and ferment in your mind so on the day you go to the airport to pick her up, you’re nearly sick with anticipation? And then when desire shows the first sign of contentment, throw it back it its cage and let it slowly build itself back into a state of starved fury. Then when you are together, it all matters. So that when you look into her eyes, you lose your balance, so that when she touches you, it feels like you have never been touched before.
When she says your name, you think it was she who named you. When she has gone, you bury your face in the pillow to smell her hair and you lie awake at night remembering your face in her neck, her breathing and the amazing smell of her skin. Your eyes go wet because you want her so bad and miss her so much. Now that is worth the miles and the time. That matches the inferno of life. Otherwise you poison each other with your presence day after day as you drag each other through the inevitable mundane aspects of your lives.
That is the slow death that I see slapped on faces everywhere I go. It’s part of the world’s sadness that’s more empty than cold, poorly lit rooms in cities of the American night"
In other words, a slow natural death tagging along after a depressing life is ones personal decision to pursue, in that if you don't have the stones to live life on the edge, then get your happy on and embrace boring.
Suicides are murderers, sometimes they take only themselves, sometimes they take others.
Bottom line is that death sucks, it's unpredictable, and when kids are involved it is the ultimate horror.
It's wise to avoid inflicting horror on kids by all means necessary.
What do you mean? Involved as in was a victim of the same crime?
Dennis Cole dogged rollins for the rest of his life
I experience through many years of severe depression, it seems to run in my mother’s family and it doesn’t have much to do with enduring hardship. At that time, it wouldn’t have mattered to me if you put me in the Hanoi Hilton or in a mansion with servants catering to my every whim. Heaven and Hell? Either one seemed preferable to having a mind that can’t seem to stop battling with itself. And I don’t mean a mind “battling against itself” as in conscious battle of the will, I mean it more like a machine that’s malfunctioning, continuously struggling against itself to perform it’s intended task. Most people who haven’t been through depression seem to think that a deeply depressed person is just feeling sad, but in my case most of the time I was struggling to feel anything at all.
“You don’t quit and you don’t walk away from your children and your family.”
How do you know they didn’t quit and walk away from him? Plenty of people will, many people can’t get away fast enough. It’s happened to me many times, and it came to a point that I had to just give up and walk away from my mother, she had been talking about committing suicide for most of my life, and it had put my near my own breaking point. Getting away from a bad situation didn’t cure my own depression and frankly I was worried as hell she’d actually go through with it, but thank God, it ended up helping both of us in the long run.
Yes there is and your displaying it.
you're ?
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