LancierDombre Posted October 8, 2015 Posted October 8, 2015 I'm not sure if this is quite the right board for this discussion but I'm sure the moderators can move it if they feel it belongs elsewhere. I don't normally give a damn about the Kennedy family - they're quite literally a crime family. However, I was listening to NPR in the car yesterday and an interesting story about Patrick Kennedy came up. Apparently he's published a memoire in which he talks about his struggle with addiction. What is creating a stir though is that he talks about his entire family's problem with alcoholism, and he apparently didn't get their permission to publish any of those stories. I'll see if I can find a link to the audio but if it exists online I haven't found it yet. "So what?", you may ask. "That's too bad, I wish him well, but I'm sick of hearing about the Kennedys" That's where my thoughts were going at first too, but the discussion really got under my skin. It went a little something like this: Woman Host: "It was wrong of Patrick to release these stories without getting the permission of his family, especially in such gruesome detail. He talks about his parents being too drunk to get out of bed in the morning and having to hide his mother from guests so that they wouldn't find out she was drunk in the middle of the day." Man Host: "But I think it's justifiable if telling these stories help people who have gone through similar experiences." Woman Host: "But she's his mother" Repeat... Caller: "You have to remember Ted Kennedy is from an older generation in which you didn't talk about those sorts of problems..." blah, blah, blah... I haven't read this memoire, so all I have to go on is what was discussed during the time in which I was listening to this program, but if the stuff about his parents being shit-faced drunk in the middle of the day is true... I think that's crossing into abuse territory at that point and it annoyed me that it was never acknowledged. Sure, Patrick might not have gotten his mother's permission to share those horrific sounding stories. Did she ask him if he wanted to play hide your drunk mother? So what do you think? Do you think this was a way of Patrick getting back at his abusers or what?
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