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Wednesday, April 2, 2014

More on the Rhetoric of Help

My husband is reading Lights out in Wonderland by DBS Pierre and ran across this quote:

"The need of this assortment of new-age ano-extremists to patronize, wield authority, and lord false compassion over others is a more breathtaking and sinister disturbance of character than anything I could aspire to.  

This has me thinking again about the rhetoric of help.  This quote gets at what is disturbing to me in the question "who gets to help and who has to be helped."  This idea of swooping in to "fix" people in poverty and then lording over them how much better we are than them as a "breathtaking disturbance of character."  I'm going to be thinking about this one for a while.