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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mark silvers who wrote (27160)	1/3/1999 4:44:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

<I guess we will have to disagree. I view Diana as a selfish and spoiled person, who was to used to glamour, and canonized by the press. I wonder why you fail to see all the things that were written negatively about her(and to a far greater degree than what was written about Mother Thearesa.)> Well, the things that were written negatively about Diana that seem to be true tend to be about how many love affairs she had. Also, when she was the Princess of Wales she had a huge wardrobe, which she used mostly on state occasions, which seemed extravagant to a lot of people. However, when she left the royal household, as you probably know, she sold most of her fancy dresses for charity. She visited astrologers and was in therapy, and had an eating disorder at one time. She did manipulate the press, but was also a victim of the press. I don't think manipulating the press is a sin, however, and she also used the press to bring public attention to her charities. She was born into a very old and wealthy English family; I am not sure you can blame her for that accident of birth. She was not particularly self-centered, focusing most of her energy on her children. I don't think she was really that spoiled, considering her circumstances. The things about Diana you have pointed out as negative seem pretty innocuous to me. She was definitely an emotionally disturbed young woman, whose parents had a very painful divorce when Diana was a little girl. She seemed to have a very hard time recovering from that. However, she never tried to rehabilitate any dictators like Papa Doc Duvalier, or people like Charles Keating who stole millions from U.S. taxpayers in the savings and loan scandal. If you read very many books about her, it seems that she really cared about all of the children and other unfortunates she visited, establishing relationships with their families and writing back and forth, staying in touch. She was a courageous advocate for AIDS patients, creating a stir by very publicly touching them when others were afraid to do so. At the end of her life she was leading a worldwide drive to stop the destruction of land mines, which still kill 26,000 people a year. I am standing on the point I made before--Diana was interested in the living,in preserving lives, making things better for people. Mother Teresa's efforts were simply focused on the dying, to whom she offered not even the simplest painkillers which her order could well afford, since it had millions of dollars on deposit. She also did not truly have the best interests of children in her orphanages uppermost in her mind, since she wanted them to be adopted by Catholics, not simply good parents who would give them love. I do think it is a sin to deprive children under your care of toys when you can well afford to provide them. She seemed very definitely to be an agent of a particular ideology, interested most in glorifying and sustaining that ideology. Diana took people one at a time, trying to establish some bond, touching them a lot, not differentiating by religion, and was trying to actually change things. So to me she is simply a much better human being. The fact that Christopher Hitchens is not a religious man does not mean that his investigation of Mother Teresa was inaccurate. Do you think that atheists are less credible than Christians as journalists?