Got Empathy?

Sometimes I wish people would go out on a limb and be nicer.  This morning's paper had two stern letters to the editor about Whitney Houston.  One writer said, "She overindulged herself like all the others before her and paid the price."  Another wrote, "Unfortunately, she was another drug addict who made some poor decisions." 

I don't think she overindulged herself.  I think she was driven to self-destruction by a disease, and I'm learning more about it in a book  I'm reading, "The Tennis Partner," by Abraham Verghese.  He's a doctor who played tennis with a medical student who'd been through drug rehab several times.  When this student arrived at a clinic in Atlanta especially for doctor-users,  another doctor told him, "you have a disease, a  disorder in your forebrain, a genetic defect that makes you so susceptible [to using drugs]."  Ultimately, the disease killed him.

Almost certainly Whitney Houston, who struggled for more than a decade with drug abuse,  suffered from this disease.  And,  as columnist Caille Millner pointed out,  Houston was also "an untouchable princess...representative of black female dignity," a role model for a generation of middle-class black women.   Now there's some pressure.

So why not give poor Whitney a break, letter-writers?   Is it my imagination or are there more harsh, dismissive judgments floating around these days, especially in the political sphere?  And to me, there seems to be a correlation between people who hate the "nanny state" interfering in our lives, and people who act like  nannies themselves and not very nice ones. 

But I'll try to be charitable.