What do Facebook users and protestors have in common?
Enablers of the month:
The 100,000 or so people who joined a Facebook page supporting the actions of flight attendant Steven Slater, who slid down the emergency chute of a JetBlue airplane after instigating at least one confrontation with a passenger. We’ve honored many famous addicts to their deaths, from Marilyn Monroe to actor Health Ledger; I suppose it’s only fitting an unknown becomes known for his alcoholic antic and that we honor and enable him. As pointed out in “Drunks, Drugs & Debits: How to Recognize Addicts and Avoid Financial Abuse,” we need to learn to “uncompromisingly disenable,” before tragedy happens.
Some 300 protestors at the LAPD’s Rampart Station, along with a similar number at a community meeting the next night, who were protesting the LAPD shooting of a very drunk Manuel Jamines after he refused to drop his switchblade, with which he had been threatening passersby and then police. Jamines’ family acknowledged that he had “a drinking problem” but that he was “not violent.” Until he could have been.