Elf Sternberg

My neighbors, the Christian natalists who are otherwise pretty cool "evangelize once and then leave them alone when they've said no thank you" types, recently suffered a nasty family tragedy when their eldest, a bright young woman who used to babysit the kids before she went to college, was struck by a car. She wasn't killed, but she's been in a wheelchair and pre-physical therapy for the past few weeks. While we were at the mall this afternoon, I decided to pop into a greeting card store and buy her a "Get well" card.

While I was looking through the list of possibilities, I spotted the card visible there in the photograph. Are there really enough people going in and out of rehab that "Get out of Rehab soon" cards are economically viable?

That card in the photo isn't the only one. There were several, one of which actually featured Snoopy from Peanuts. The card showed him driving a car-- I'm quite sure Charles Schultz did not draw this-- and it had platitudes about "dealing with life's curves and jams."

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it reflects just how strange our culture is getting that we now advertise our rehabilitation rather than keep it to ourselves. I think this goes into my folder along with my consequentialist philosophy of hypocrisy: societies function better with a little hypocrisy, a little "we keep that under the covers, denied and unmentioned, even if we know some people are doing it. We don't want to stop them; that would be sand in the wheels of life. But we don't want them to admit it, for the sake of the grease."