Carma at the MCG, and the Comments Section We Deserve

Saw the story on Tuesday, another car chase ending badly, this time outside the MCG. A stolen Mustang, a crash, a dead carjacker, an injured bystander. The kind of story that used to shock me and now just makes me tired in a specific, familiar way.

What got me wasn’t the crash itself. It was the comments underneath it. Hundreds of them, and about eighty percent landed somewhere between “good riddance” and “carma” (yes, someone actually wrote that, and yes, someone corrected the spelling like it mattered). There’s a real appetite out there for cheering when someone dies badly, as long as they’ve been sorted into the “deserved it” basket beforehand. I get the impulse. I don’t love where it leads.

Here’s the tension I can’t resolve, and I’m not going to pretend I can: a 46-year-old man stealing cars is almost certainly not a well person making good decisions. Nobody grows up dreaming of being a middle-aged carjacker. Something went wrong long before that Mustang hit a tree, probably years and years wrong, addiction or mental illness or just a life that never had a single door open in it. That’s a genuinely sad story. And also, he put a stranger’s life at risk doing something reckless and criminal, and that stranger didn’t sign up for any of it. Both of those things are true at once. I don’t think you have to pick one.

What I found more interesting, honestly, was the side conversation that broke out about stolen cars themselves, how attached people get to them. One commenter described his wife being “near suicidal” after her car was stolen, comparing it to a member of the family, and got absolutely roasted for it in the replies. I don’t think he was lying, for what it’s worth. I’ve known people who are genuinely wrecked by property loss in ways that seem disproportionate from the outside but are completely real on the inside. Grief doesn’t always attach itself to the things we’d rank as most important. Sometimes it’s the ute your dad gave you, sometimes it’s a Santa Fe you finally saved up for after years of night shifts. Mockery is cheap and easy online. Empathy takes about four more seconds and most people can’t be bothered.

I think about this stuff more than I used to, partly because Victoria’s car theft numbers have genuinely gone up, thirty-odd thousand vehicles a year according to one figure floating around in that thread, and partly because I drive past the MCG most weeks for work and it’s strange watching a place that means footy finals and Boxing Day Tests turn up in a headline like this. Melbourne holds a lot of things at once. Always has.

None of this fixes anything. The courts probably won’t get tougher in the way people online want, the underlying causes (housing, addiction services, mental health funding, all the unglamorous stuff nobody wants to pay for) won’t get better because of one Reddit thread getting heated. But I’d like it if we could hold two thoughts in our heads without one cancelling the other out: sympathy for the bystander who didn’t ask for any of this, and something less gleeful than “good riddance” for a bloke whose life clearly went sideways long before Tuesday. That’s not a moral high ground thing. It’s just, dancing on someone’s grave has never once made a city safer.