....
When those people are living hand to mouth, they’re too busy scrambling
to pay their bills to worry about trivia. But, when they have a roof
over their heads, money in their pockets, and free time, they spend
their days doing what critics do.
This is not new. Even Machiavelli had people like this in his time,
“And
many writers have imagined for themselves republics and principalities
that have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for there is
such a gap between how one lives and how one ought to live that anyone
who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin
rather than his preservation…..”
There
are people offended by American flags, by non-offensive words like
“niggardly” that sound similar to offensive words, by Christian
business owners who don’t want to bake cakes for gay weddings, by
children’s songs that mention pigs and there’s even a family that’s
terribly upset about Ben & Jerry’s “Hazed and Confused” ice cream
because….well, can you even guess? It’s because their son died in 2008
in a hazing incident and so they’ve decided they don’t like the word
“hazed.”
The difference between today and the start of the 16th century is that
our prosperity has allowed a few puddles full of whiners to grow into
an ocean and worse yet, we REWARD them for bellyaching.
In the era of the Internet and reality TV, everyone seems to be chasing
Andy Warhol’s “fabled 15 minutes of fame” and one of the easiest ways
to get them, especially if you don’t have any talent or don’t want to
work for them, is to throw a big public pity party for yourself.
There are people like Cindy Sheehan, Sandra Fluke and to a lesser
degree, even Hillary Clinton who managed to turn being professional
victims into careers.
[more
Pity Party Nation: Who Cares If You're Offended?]
