What if a plane crashed and nobody remembered it: would it still exist

Another week and another man let go while Aung San Suu Kyi is still imprisoned by the walls of her house, with another year and a half just added to the sentence that was about to expire when American John Yettaw decided to force himself upon her. John Yettaw has since been freed and allowed to return home to the US. This week's political release was someone found guilty of killing 288 people in 1988. Convicted by the Scottish judiciary system following the explosion and subsequent crash of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, Abdel Baset el-Megrahi was diagnosed in prison with prostate cancer. Now expected to live only months, he was released on so-called "compassionate grounds," allowed by Scottish law.

Nasty rumors are rampant. After the newly freed man was given a hero's welcome as he stepped off the plane in his home country of Libya, Libyan leaders loudly and profusely thanked the British government for freeing him, citing it as a welcome accomplishment of a oft-sought goal in trade negotiations between Libya and Britain. Britsh officials have, of course, roundly denied this preposterous idea. Whatever might possibly persuade any part of the waning British empire to consider freeing a man who their own judiciary found guilty of murdering hundreds of innocent civilians, most of them American?

Hmmm. Could it be that slimy old rascal who keeps appearing in all the trouble spots of the world, our old friend OIL? Why, as a matter of fact, Libya does just happen to have, as the British are wont to say in that lovely, melodic way they have of making English sound courtly still, "lots and lots and lots of" yessirree, oil. In fact, Prince Andrew was just preparing to leave on a special trade mission to Libya when all this unwelcome attention fell on the issues of Libyan/British relationships.

Compassion. I rather like compassion. I like it when kitties are rescued from trees, when traffic is held up by pedestrians to give an elderly woman more time to make a crossing, when a student who is genuinely ill is given a second chance to take a missed final examination. I don't mind it when prisoners are allowed to work away from prison or given conjugal visits in nice, private rooms or time to cuddle with their children. In many, many cases I wouldn't even mind it if an elderly prisoner was allowed to return home to die.

But not a mass murderer. Not someone whose disregard for life cost nearly three hundred people their lives and the thousands of people who loved those 288 people the long-lasting pain of sudden, unanticipated loss that leaves you hanging like a brown leaf from a burned out tree in the center of a battlefield. This is not compassion. This is disrespect. This is haunting, chilling, frightful disrespect.

And if it turns out in any way to be related to a favorable trade deal, may the spirits of those 288 dead haunt the British ministers into their own early graves.