He buys the men who clear the way, who draw the plans to make it pay

Today I learned that Caroll Spinney and René Auberjonois had died and earlier this week it was D.C. Fontana and last week it was Jonathan Miller and I know age is a thing, but I am sick of people dying who contribute so much to the world while the people who destroy it somehow stick around. Each death of an artist or a writer or an activist or simply a person who was kind, I keep thinking it. Or as the poet said it better in 1941:

for I am stricken
as never before,

by the thought
of ineptitude, sloth, evil

that prosper,
while such as he fall.

—H.D., "R.A.F."