My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #35, April 5, 1999

VAMPIRES

I think if I hear one more reporter ask one more bereaved mother how she feels about her daughter being raped and strangled, I may be moved to strangle the reporter. If I hear one more interviewer asking a widow if she has achieved closure yet, I may puke.

At the risk of being mistaken for Miss Manners, if this ever happened to me, I hope I would be able to fix them with a glacial stare and ask them what earthly business it was of theirs? And would they please take away their cameras and lights, get their satellite trucks off my lawn, and leave me to deal with my grief in private?

It's old-fashioned of me, I know, but I believe in a decent reticence about private emotions. Should I ever need to talk with someone about my deepest doubts or fears or even anguish, it would be with a friend I have absolute trust in. That friend would let me say what I needed to say, feel what I needed to feel. He would not try to hustle me through socially-approved stages of mourning: 3 weeks for numbness, 6 weeks for anger, etc. He would understand me well enough to know that I would be angry for as long as I needed to be, thank you. I could talk freely to him because I know what I said would go no farther.

What I would NOT do is tell Barbara Walters and a few million viewers.

If I am angry with someone, I first take a little time to cool down and then I deal with that person as directly and calmly as I can. What I would NOT do is go on Jerry Springer's show to stage a confrontation in public.

Under no circumstances would I feed the enormous public thirst for raw emotion (the uglier the better), for public confessions of rejection, humiliation, adultery, drug use. In my book, you confess your sins in private, not in a press conference, to a counselor or priest, not to Sam Donaldson. I did not want to know about Clinton's private encounters, but even less do I want to know how he explains himself to his God.

I'm not sure why it is that we seem to draw sustenance from wallowing in other people's unhappiness. The Germans have a word, schadenfreude, that means taking pleasure in other people's misery, and perhaps that is part of it. If our lives are hard or joyless, at least our sons didn't commit mass murder, our daughters didn't run away and sell themselves on the streets, our husbands did not abandon us and steal our children.

I wonder if it's because our own lives lack color. Most of us live human-scale lives, with more routine in them than drama. Our love lives are real but not epic. Our achievements are the sort that earn us gold watches, not Emmys. If our sorrows are not on a grand scale, neither are our joys. And as long as we're only comparing our lives with those of the people around us, this may be enough for contentment, even happiness.

But when we compare ourselves with the folks on television, we never seem to be having quite as much fun as people in beer ads, and the people in the bars we frequent aren't anything like the folks on Cheers. Our lives lack the high drama of ER, the casual snarky relationships and good times of Seinfeld. Our love lives must seem plodding and unimaginatively monagamous to the people on the soap operas and Friends.

Face it--our lives could use better scriptwriters. It might be nice to have funnier friends, more moments of drama, and problems that are easily resolved in 24 minutes (though we'd probably settle for a plot line we at least understood).

I think this may be why so many of us read the National Enquirer, and watch the Barbara Walters specials, waiting for her to make a celebrity start crying. It's reassuring to know that there are tradeoffs for wealth and stardom; it makes our own ordinary lives seem not boring but safe. We feed on their violated privacy, gain the color and drama of their lives without risking the security and comfort of our own.

And watching the dysfunctional families slugging it out on Jerry Springer makes our own families look pretty good. We may have our conflicts, but we work them out with words; our idea of violent quarrels involves slamming doors and hurling insults, not tearing each other's hair out.

Now, it is natural and normal to be curious about other people's emotional lives, just as it is normal to be curious about car wrecks, and what other people look like naked. But at least we have the grace to be ashamed of our curiosity about those.

Perhaps we do understand that our nosiness is unseemly, because our excuse for butting into the lives of people in distress is always that we only want to help. We want to reach out, share their pain, help them recover. It sounds noble, and reasonable. We are, after all, part of a therapeutic culture which is full of crisis centers, 24-hour hotlines, and 12-step programs to cure everything from alcoholism to the urge to rape children.

One problem of the culture of therapy, however, is that most of us are not qualified to help . We have no idea how to counsel people with their problems or grief. The best we can do is listen, and nowhere near enough of us do that. Too many people are insisting we move briskly through the stages of healing, and complaining if we don't achieve closure quickly enough. Worse, they're not asking us about our feelings, they're TELLING us what our feelings are supposed to be.

Another problem is that when people confess their sins in public, we are somehow expected to understand and forgive them.

Forget it. There are some offenses that cannot and should not be forgiven. Ever. It trivializes rape and murder and genocide to explain that the perpetrators were themselves victims. I do not care if Slobodan Milosevic's parents committed suicide; I do not care if he lies awake at night tormented by his crimes. He does not deserve therapy or forgiveness; he deserves to go to hell, go directly to hell, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 machine guns.

But the worst problem is that the culture of therapy is a culture of voyeurism. It defines private suffering as public property. Nobody has the right to shine a spotlight on us and demand that we tell the world about our grief. This has nothing to do with serving the public's need to know, and everything to do with serving its emotional vampirism. The proper answer to that reporter is "Just who do you think you are? What gives you the right to intrude?"