First Posted: 1/7/2014
Of course, as each year with which we are all blessed plays out, as the news cycle spins, our vocabulary evolves. Words are coined and become familiar to us along the way from many sources, and before you know it, we don’t talk as much as we interface nor are we fooled as much as we are catfished.
In 2013, the dictionary folks at Cambridge decided that educators should start using the noun “flipped learning” to describe occasions where students learn the content of a subject at home and then discuss and practice it in the classroom.
They’d also like us to be aware of “impression management,” which is the process of controlling how other people see you and “digital afterlife” to describe the content of our lives that remains online after we die.
Now, with any new words infused into our vocabularies, almost all are pre-existing words used in a new way, and such is the case with the new version of “afluenza.” In economic circles, the word has been around for a while to describe extreme materialism and the over-consumption of goods, according to Dictionary.com.
However, in 2013 the word has been given a different twist, thanks to its introduction by a psychologist, Dr. G. Dick Miller, who has made quite a tidy sum over the years as an expert witness in court cases. It was his use of the word “afluenza” while testifying for the defense that has removed yet a few more bricks from the diminishing wall that was once accountability.
Miller’s new definition describes it as the end result of someone growing up in such affluence that they lack the ability to see any link between behavior and consequences.
The case in question is one you may have heard of, one that involved a teenager from a wealthy Texan family, Ethan Couch, who, over Father’s Day weekend, took a drunken joy ride with several friends and ran over four pedestrians, killing them.
Miller’s testimony contained some interesting points. He referred to Couch as a product of affluenza, where it was repeatedly reinforced to him that wealth bought privilege and that there was no rational link between behavior and consequences.
As a result, Miller referred to Couch as having the emotional age of 12 because he was so coddled. Therefore, accordingly, because Couch came from such a sick family system with overindulgent parents, it just wouldn’t be right to punish him too strenuously for killing four people by sending him to another sick system, prison.
The combination of Miller’s testimony and a judge who agreed with Couch’s lawyers’ proposal that his sentence should be his being sent to a posh $450,000-a-year teen treatment center called Newport Academy in Newport Beach, Calif., to be with other “victims” of afluenza so that he can learn the accountability skills he wasn’t taught at home.
Wow, is all I can say to that one. Miller’s testimony has been dubbed by cynics as the “spoiled-brat defense” and, of course, because it’s now worked once, it becomes somewhat of a legal precedent, which means it’s a near certainty we’ll be hearing about afluenza again down the line.
In the magazine Sports Illustrated, for the past 20 years, there has been a short section called “Sign of the Apocalypse,” to refer to some occurrence in the sports world so ludicrous that it just may signal that, for sports, the end may be near. If this troubling and tragic case involving the loss of human life times four were a sports-related event no doubt, this would be an SI entry.
So, in looking back at this past year’s news events, not only is this perhaps my most troubling story but it’s also a story that’s given me my least favorite word.
Anytime there is an abdication of personal responsibility for anyone old enough to possess free will, there is a lesson that sadly comes with it.
And, that lesson is, if you look long enough and hard enough at the bad and sometimes even tragic consequences of someone’s actions, there is always someone or something else that is to blame.
