Two Boston Globe stories today show the gulf
between the serious problems of ordinary people and the neuroses of the upper
crust (I remember when “crust” meant impudence or arrogance – nerve, chutzpah,
etc.)
On the one
hand, a Haitian American nurse who defended another nurse of color she thought
was being unfairly treated, and found herself retaliated against, just won a
major lawsuit against one of the city’s biggest hospitals. Forced to take basic tests again, told of
complaints against her that never were filed, she received a huge settlement
for defendant conduct that was “outrageous or egregious, involving evil motive
or reckless indifference to the rights of others.”
Just below
that article is the headline “Globe editor investigated over alleged text
exchange.” The exchange: a former sub-editor
for the paper’s online arm produced a text message in which the editor-in-chief
allegedly wrote “What do you usually wear when you write?” at some unknown time
in the past.
The
sub-editor described this horrific sentence as “a sext-type text
from someone who was powerful enough that you felt you couldn’t do anything
(other than panic/shake your head/cry).”
Excuse me? “what do you usually
wear when you write?” In a text? And she’s panicking at her desk? A “sext-type text”? She must know that almost
every writer of any note – which I doubt includes her – has been asked that
question, and there are whole books devoted to writers at their desks in their
writing garb. How Joan Didion, Proust,
Thomas Wolfe and others dressed and where they wrote are legendary.
This
is how the greedy and the privileged co-opt serious issues and make them seem
ludicrous in the eyes of people who would otherwise be happy to fight a real
injury.
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