Thursday, January 28, 2010

Dear Abby, you're killing us!

Feels like I'm showing my age, or betraying my generation or something, by even commenting on or noticing what Abigail Van Buren says. But so what, this one really gets to me....

Today, a writer asks Dear Abby for guidance because her friend "Sally" calls all the time and cries to her over the phone. Sally's been seeing a psychiatrist and taking meds for at least 15 years for profound depression. Abby says the writer should stop letting Sally vent, because she probably needs her meds adjusted, and only the psychiatrist can offer the tools she needs to improve.

My God! This has to be almost the ultimate in denial of individual responsibility, an utter degradation of human relations and human value.

Let me get this straight. Dear Abby says lay people can't really help each other. In fact, they should refuse to help each other in any other way than by calling the psychiatrist, because only the psychiatrist can really help anyone -- and only with meds, of course.

Geez Abby, let's just shoot each other. After all, we're nothing but inconsequential, meaningless chemical reactions. Our only duty is to look in the mirror each morning and profess our dead certainty that we're staring at a machine, pure and simple, fully controllable and fully explainable without reference to any concept of soul, ethics, purpose, friendship, nobility, aesthetics or love. We deserve and we should expect nothing but that answering salute to the gladiators, those who are about to die.

This is a pitiful, ultramaterialistic, and antisocial point of view. Abigail Van Buren should be shunned, like the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi groups, by the media. She's not entertaining or helpful, but some kind of anti-human ... porno. She should not be in the papers.

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