Death is no big deal, at least not to time

180 seconds of Presidential time was spent announcing the next Cheif Justice of the Supreme Court. It could have been a talk about grain harvesting or pork belly futures or any one of a thousand million other things. A man fights thyroid cancer for years and then dies and the world does not stop even for an instant, not even for the passing of a Supreme Court Justice. Time didn't stop when John Kennedy was killed either; it kept on chewing away the days, weeks, months and years, while the assasinaiton went from volumes of books, to magazine articles, to tv history shows, to a small 6pt type footnote, and in the future only historians will know about it. And in a thousand years the vast majority of humans will not even know the name at all. They won't know who Bush was either. The great eraser continues its inexorable march across all our blackboards. All the people who died last week in the Hurricane or died in the floods that followed go the same way. The memory of all of them will fade away until nothing of them exists on planet Earth but their descendants who won't even know them or how they died.
So what is the big eraser? Death? No death gets to meet the same fate as those it claims. Time destroys death too. It takes away it's sting for those left behind. Time eradicates its stench, smooths over the melodrama. We all tend to put too much ephasis on defeating death when Time is the real nemisis. For even if we did eventually, at long last, rid ourselves of the scurge of death we are faced with what? An eternity of time for us to contemplate how to escape it monstrous grind away at civilizations, and lives, and planets, and galaxies. Would we then try to reinvent death so we could escape the mad house? Or would we try to kill Time off? But that would lead to a single frozen moment, with no thought, or feeling, or manner to percieve existance. So we would all, though frozen in the instant, be for all intents and purposes dead.
Clearly we are, like Candide, in the best of all possible worlds. We get to exist for how ever long we get to exist. Death gets to clear off earth to make room for more of us. Time gets to take the sting of death from the harts of those left behind. All is as it should be.