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A pathetic response
Dimitri Vassilaros is a Tribune-Review editorial page editor. He can be reached at dvassilaros@tribweb.com or 412-380-5637. He also blogs at KDKA
After getting telephone calls, e-mail and letters to the editor complaining about a recent column referencing the "pathetically handicapped," I feel like someone on the wrong end of a beat-down.
All this because the offended do not seem to understand or even care about the definition of "pathetic."
Apologists for mass transit have been using people with afflictions such as multiple sclerosis and blindness, as well as those in wheelchairs, to protest the lack of additional state funding for government monopolies such as the Port Authority of Allegheny County.
The more compelling the victim, the more likely a gullible public can be persuaded to increase the never-ending mass-transit subsidies.
Even though taxpayers subsidize about 67 percent of each ride, the Port Authority is threatening to reduce service to lessen its massive expenses. I suggested other ways to solve the problem, such as allowing private transit companies to compete for the riders' business. Better cost controls offered by competitors could result in better service for everyone.
Another suggestion was that the Port Authority reduce wages and benefits, since labor is about 75 percent to 80 percent of its expenses.
These commonsense solutions were lost in translation because many readers mistook pathetic to be trivializing and demeaning. Others just telephoned to shout at me for being insensitive.
Do any of these people have dictionaries, and if so, do they know how to use them?
"Pathetic" comes from the Greek pathetikos ("sensitive") and from pathos ("suffering"), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
"Arousing or capable of arousing sympathetic sadness and compassion," according to the American Heritage Dictionary.
"1. Causing or evoking pity, sympathetic sadness, sorrow, etc.; pitiful; pitiable: a pathetic letter; a pathetic sight. 2. Affecting or moving the feelings. 3. Pertaining to or caused by the feelings," according to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary.
"Affecting or moving the tender emotions, esp. pity or grief; full of pathos; as, a pathetic song or story," according to Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary.
How can you see someone who has lost the use of his eyes, legs or other body parts and not feel profound sadness? How can you not have empathy?
Every morning (well, most mornings), I start by thanking God for His endless blessings to me and my loved ones -- starting with our good health. I am acutely aware that these gifts can be taken away forever in the blink of an eye.
Since the vast majority of the dwindling Port Authority ridership are able-bodied people, I am personally and deeply offended when protesters sink to using the handicapped to score public relations points.
And as a red herring obfuscating legitimate alternatives for this perennial problem.
John L. Tague Jr., president of the Allegheny Transit Council, is one of those upset with my column.
This was the first sentence of his message to me (a copy of which was sent to 17 other people):
"As a person with a disability and a power wheelchair user, I am neither handicapped nor pathetic."
I did not have the energy to look up the definition of "handicapped."
