Oh, Oh! The Pain Of It!
New trends are hard to beat. People grasp at these explicatory life-savers and cling to them as though their lives depend on them. And sometimes they do. Like the person who kills but throws himself on the mercy of the courts because of a deprived childhood. Like the person who murdered their spouse because they could no longer tolerate the abuse. Like the person who steals because he has a habit that required sustenance-renewal. Like the drug trafficker because well, he's got to make a living too.We extend compassion toward all. Someone was raised in an impoverished household, was abused as a child, then goes on to celebrate adulthood by wreaking havoc on society, and the foxy lawyer wrings sympathy from the jury which then refuses to submit a finding of guilt. No one has any natural moral or ethical compass to guide them out of the quagmire of ill-doing. People cannot look around them and feel responsible for their positions within the larger society. Whatever goes wrong is always someone else's fault.
And incarcerated felons now can sue prison guards, even the prison system or the local government that oversees the prison if he thinks he can prove his civil rights have been trampled. That he hasn't received his meals sufficiently heated, that he hasn't been permitted conjugal visits as required, that tools essential to the craft he's been learning in prison have been removed from his jail-cell possession; you name it.
Now here's the latest; a man in White Plains New York recently fired by IBM for visiting an adult chat room at work. He's suing the company for a cool $5M. Not his fault, he is addicted to the Internet and doesn't deserve to be treated like an outcast. His is a disease, an unfortunate social disease which requires sympathy and treatment, not censure.
James Pacenza, fully 58 years of acquired wisdom, claims he visits chat rooms in an effort to treat the traumatic stress he's suffered as a result of an incident in 1969 when he witnessed the death of his best friend during a patrol in Vietnam. That very same stress also caused him to become a "sex addict, and with the development of the Internet, an Internet addict".
"Plaintiff was discharged by IBM because he visited an Internet chat room for a sexual experience during work after he had been previously warned," IBM claims. The company says its policy against surfing sexual websites is clear, claiming Mr. Pacenza was informed he could lose his job, after an incident that occurred four months earlier.
Mr. Pacenza claims age discrimination contributed to IBM's actions. IBM said sexual behaviour disorders are excluded from the disabilities act and they denied the allegation of age discrimination. But Mr. Pacenza knows better, he knows the strings to pull to wrench the hearts of sympathetic jurors.
Yes! He claims protection now, under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Labels: Human Fallibility
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, February 21, 2007
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