Caring is not helping
My mother taught special ed for years and years. She said you could tell when a volunteer was going to wash out in the first week, because she’d be all, “oh, the poor darlings!” You have to be able to make retard jokes to hack it in the retard biz.
Me, I tend to be pretty far over in the boo-hoo end of the scale. “Well, isn’t that special, Princess,” I says to myself, “you care too much to help. We call that: FAIL.” So I make myself do whatever half-assed stuff I can manage, like give blood or visit the pussoes. Then I go home and drink. I’m Mama’s special little throbbing raw nerve ending.
I have huge admiration for the people who shovel the world’s shit for a living. Doctors and nurses. Soldiers. Cops. There’s a reason all the hardest professions have a reputation for black humor: it’s the only way they can bear to do what they do. And it’s awfully easy to slip off the tippy top of that bell curve into one of the unhelpful places on either side.
I got here thinking about Ingrid Newkirk, wondering if she started out okay and went batshit insane staring into the abyss. I don’t think so. There’s another kind of person that thrives in dark places: the kind for whom misery is like oxygen. Doctors, as a class, have given the world more than their fair share of serial killers.
Sometimes I think only religious people should tackle the hard jobs. Specifically, religions which teach of an afterlife (or a future life) chock full of justice. Or retribution. At the very least, a damn good reason why things have to be the way they are.
August 6, 2008 — 2:57 pm
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