When I saw the headline on The Ethicist’s weekly New York Times column: “Is It Wrong to Leave My 85-Year-Old Mother Alone on Thanksgiving?” I thought, “Wait, is this the Onion making fun of The Ethicist?” No, “Name Withheld” really submitted that question, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, who has been The New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist columnist since 2015 and teaches philosophy at N.Y.U., really thought it was worthy of publication. The inquirer writes in part,
“…The concern here is that my sibling is going out of town for Thanksgiving with his family. My spouse and I would also like to go away for the first holiday we’ve had to ourselves in a long time! But there’s my mother. She’s pretending our proposed getaway is perfectly fine with her and that she’ll find some way to spend the holiday, but she’s clearly not looking forward to it. I’m torn between thinking, She’s a big girl, she’ll manage, and thinking that my spouse and I should suck it up this year and have Thanksgiving with my mother, and then maybe next year things will be different. I’d appreciate your thoughts.”
What the hell? Mom’s not a “big girl,” she’s an old girl, and at 85, every Thanksgiving, heck, every day could be her last. “Suck it up”? SUCK IT UP????? All the mother has is her family, and her children are choosing to leave her alone in her twilight years on the American holiday that symbolizes loving families.
Here is the brain-dead response from The Ethicist, which I am publishing in all its unethical, incompetent glory:
Cue Jason Alexander: “Would that be wrong?”
The so-called ethicist is trying to cover every base and most of the time that might be helpful. Not in this case.
When escaping CA we specifically moved to NM because our daughter is here. It is a blue state, after all, and we don’t need more of that craziness. But it is a rural, poor state and won’t soon have enough money to be as stupid as California.
Normally we spend holidays with our daughter and any other family who can join us. If we go to Louisiana or Arizona or California, or stay home here in new Mexico, that’s fine with us – we’re with family. I hope to be 85 some day, spending my holidays with family as always. They’ll strap me to the top of the car if there’s no other room ….