www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall American injustice

Dear Eddie,

That would be all fine and dandy, but I can't help but feel that Paris has a learning disability, which probably led to her behavior and problems in the first place. I believe she is on some sort of medication, no doubt an anti-depressant, that would have been the result of her disabilities.

That she was late in going to court, was probably more due to anxiety rather than with a deliberate intent on her part, as assumed by the judge. Now these are not the type of things that people around her, and especially her parents would want to reveal. Certainly we have seen, by the reaction of so many, just how cruel people can be.

I think, since problems such as ADD and ADHD are so prevalent in this day and age, rather than faulting her and her parents for these shortcomings, we should be spending more time on finding out why so many in this day and age have these problems. The same way we should try to find out why so many children today are autistic.

Enough said!

God Bless,

Zenovia

Thank God that in her fear, she has found a spark of His goodness and presence! Indeed, Zenovia was correct about her having ADD. Anyone who knows anything about this condition, would not have been so judgemental. I also assumed that such was the case. Many young people today suffer from forms of mental illness and/or learning disabilities.

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Fox411

Paris Hilton: 'God Has Given Me This New Chance'
Monday, June 11, 2007

LOS ANGELES � Paris Hilton will no longer "act dumb" now that God has given her a "new chance" in prison, she told Barbara Walters on Sunday in a collect phone call she made to the newswoman from prison.

"'I used to act dumb. It was an act. That act is no longer cute. It is not who I am,'" Walters quoted the hotel heiress as saying when she recounted the phone call she had with Hilton Monday on "The View."

Meanwhile, 26-year-old Hilton may have been let out early over the weekend because she allegedly suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and claustrophobia, TMZ.com reported.

The socialite has "extreme" ADD and claustrophobia and is taking the drug Adderall for the former condition, according to TMZ, which reported Monday that Hilton wasn't receiving all her medications while she was in jail. The celebrity gossip Web site didn't elaborate, saying its unidentified sources were not specific.

In any case, all of that led Hilton to have "severe" anxiety attacks while she was behind bars, and there were times she was in such bad shape that she wasn't able to push the panic button in her cell, according to TMZ. Those circumstances could have caused the sheriff to allow Hilton to go free early.

(She told Walters she wanted to do something meaningful with her life, like raise money for breast cancer since she's had relatives who have been afflicted with the disease.

Hilton also said she wanted to be a better role model for the young girls who look up to her, according to Walters. She said she decided to drop her appeal because she didn't want to cause any more trouble, and prison and the chaos surrounding her sentence have made her realize she must clean up her act.

"God has given me this new chance," she said. "I've become much more spiritual."

Walters said she sounded tired, but totally aware of what she was saying. Hilton told Walters how terrible her initial three days in jail were.

"I was not eating or sleeping," she said. "I was severely depressed and felt as if I was in a cage. ... It was a horrible experience."

Gone are the expensive clothes, perfectly coiffed hair and makeup Hilton usually wears. Prisoners aren't allowed to wear makeup, and she has donned the orange-and-brown jumpsuit every inmate must dress in. Walters said she told her she hasn't looked in a mirror once since she's been behind bars.

Walters said Hilton has served nine days of her 23-day sentence and has 14 left. She is scheduled to be released June 25.

The jailhouse call came about because Kathy Hilton, Paris' mother, phoned Walters. During the conversation, Paris rang in on another line just after 3 p.m. EDT.

When told that Kathy was talking to Walters, Paris said she'd like to speak to Walters herself because she has interviewed her several times and is a family friend, according to Walters. Paris then called Walters herself. The call was collect because all prisoners are required to call collect when they phone someone.

"Did you accept the charges?" joked Elisabeth Hasselbeck during the discussion about the conversation on "The View."

Walters said Hilton was reading The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and all the fan letters she's received while she was in her room. During short breaks outside her cell, she plays ping pong, she told Walters.

Walters said Hilton didn't complain or cry during their conversation. Walters said Kathy Hilton told her that her daughter said she will never take another drink and drive.

Nicky Hilton, Paris' younger sister, described the jailed debutante as "being strong" on her way out of a jailhouse visit on Sunday. In a statement earlier that day, Paris directed her lawyers not to appeal her sentence and urged the media to focus on more important things like Iraq.

Meanwhile, Hilton pals cut a long line of visitors Sunday to see Hilton behind bars, according to the New York Post.

Nicky Hilton and Paris' on-again, off-again boyfriend Stavros Niarchos pulled up to downtown L.A.'s Twin Towers Correctional Facility in a Range Rover chauffeured by family friend David Katzenberg, son of DreamWorks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Post reported.

L.A. County sheriff's deputies rushed to greet Nicky and Niarchos, escorting them inside and processing them in about 15 minutes � compared to the two to four hours non-VIPs have to wait on line.

Several visitors waiting outside the jail screamed, "Get in line!"

After a half-hour visit, Nicky said her sister was holding up as well as possible.

Paris is allowed one hour of visits from family and friends on Sundays and Tuesdays.

"She's being strong," said Nicky, wearing a white, Sunday-best dress.

Robin Fause, 45, who was in line to visit her boyfriend at Twin Towers, was outraged by Nicky's express check-in.

"Yesterday, I waited about four hours," Fause fumed, according to the Post. "This isn't right. We take off our Saturdays and Sundays to come here and do this."

Also Sunday, Paris was moved from her solitary room in the medical wing to the general medical ward, a jailhouse source told the Post.

And prison officials are so afraid that someone will sneak in a camera and take unauthorized pictures of her that everyone � even guards � are frisked before they're allowed to enter the area. They even have to take their shoes off, sources told the Post.

Rumors were swirling that a shot of Hilton behind bars would be worth $1 million.

"She's in an open area with beds," a jail worker said. "She's calmed down a lot since yesterday afternoon. She doesn't like being by herself, so they moved her to the medical ward."

Click Here to Visit FOXNews.com's Paris Hilton Center

FOX News' Catherine Donaldson-Evans contributed to this report.

This is good news. I will keep her in my prayers.

Joe

Dear Alice,

I assumed she had some problem like ADD, and no doubt anxiety. Otherwise why would she have been late for court. If she was a deceptive person, she would have been on time, and put on a good act in front of the judge.

It seemes obvious that she wasn't an ambitious tough cookie with an agenda to get ahead, but rather someone that had to be out all the time in order to fight depression. She was used and badly manipulated by a boyfriend, when he disclosed a video he had taken of her. Since she was a Hilton, he knew that the video was quite valuable, and that's why he made it.

This is how she became famous...or rather notorious.

God Bless,

Zenovia

"Would you care to comment more about that?"

Hey Ryan,

Sure. I'm on my honeymoon and just got married a two days ago! Which explains the delay.

The phrase economic injustice carries with it an assumption and a duty when used by politicians or people in power. The assumption is that economic inequality, to whatever degree, is unjust. The duty is that we must, by the power of the state, correct for this injustice. I would disagree with both of those statements. (I am not claiming that anybody here would suggest such a thing, but that this is what I would be uncomfortable with.)

The disparity between the "haves" and "have nots" has been with us since the beginning of the history of mankind. During the High Middle Ages in what is now England, the country was firmly stratified for the serfs and the lords. When the chains of serfdom became useless in a mercantile age at the end of the Middle Ages, former serfs could by their wits become lord-like in wealth and power. With the expanding economy came many growing pangs, as seen most painfully centuries later in the horrendous working conditions during the industrial revolution. It was from these growing pangs that various social reformers point to and correct many of those unjust working conditions. Yet others called for a more radical change, they called for a revolution which Karl Marx and Engles demanded in their writings on capitalism as the solution for its errs. With this revolution there would be no stratification, no classes. There would be economic justice.

As a way of looking at the world, Marxism is very narrow. So is its view of economic injustice. As it has an a priori assumption of atheism, Marxism cannot reconcile the scarcity of goods with the full nature of human beings. Every attempt at absolute economic control has lead to poverty and death. In failing to acknowledge the fallen nature of man, the mechanism that sustains a nation's wealth collapses.

So, that is why I would be concerned if by pointing to "economic injustice" one would desire that we could have justice through a controlled economy.

I hope this isn't too fragmented of an answer, I haven't the time to give more than an impromptu response to your question.

Terry

Indeed, often those who use the phrase "economic [in]justice" seem a little too inclined to create Socialist "utopias" that usually end up pushing to deprive people of their basic human rights.

To me, that's why the term tends to raise my hackles.

Terry and Annie:

I certainly reject Marxism, as well as other ideologies that seek to create "utopias" through stripping people of their "basic human rights." However, as someone whose grandparents were among the hardest working people one could ever know, but who, at the same time, experienced poverty that those in my generation of the family are blessed never to have known, I have a hard time ignorning the reality that there are injustices of an economic nature. Also, you can look around the world and see poverty of such horrific degree that makes the fact that my paternal grandmother and her parents had to resort to eating possums so as not to starve seem not so bad. This horrific poverty exists alongside societies where no doubt tons of food are discarded on a daily basis. Surely this is not just, and when you read Matthew 25, you realize how offensive such things are to our Lord and Savior.

Ryan

I recall that my father's parents, who were devout Irish Catholics, used to get together and distribute bread and milk to their Brooklyn neighbors in the wee hours of the a.m. My grandfather was working throughout the Depression. Many of their neighbors were not working. They realized that their neighbors might be embarrassed by being fed and rejected offers of help.

So my grandparents anoynmously shopped for them and left them what they needed. My father and his brothers and sister were scolded severely by their mother if they did not keep their school uniforms and shoes in good shape. These were also distributed to neighborhood kids the following year. My dad told me he got only a couple sets of clothes per year, even though his parents could afford more. They were floating their neighbors. His mom would buy for kids whose moms could not buy for them.

As long as the wealth is voluntarily redistributed by the people who have it, I think it is a good thing.

Annie:

May God eternally bless the memory of your generous grandparents. Unfortunately, in the rural South, where my grandparents lived, there were many communities where there was literally no one who was in a position to offer the sort of generous assistance your grandparents offered to their neighbors. This is just one of the reasons why I support federal social welfare programs (though I would also support further reform of these programs to help prevent their abuse by those who are merely lazy, and not truly in need of assistance).

Ryan

Dear Annie,

God bless your grandparents. They were true Christians. I know my grandmother would tell stories of people in need in the old country, and how others would help them out. Welfare didn't exist in that day and age. It was usually the priest or bishop that tended to them by approaching some wealthy parishoner.

I recall my mother telling me that she wanted to deposit $25.00 at the bank during the depression in Brooklyn. It was quite a sum in those days, (a whole weeks wage), and on the way to the bank she lost it. The money was found and given back to her by a child of a poor Irish family. The family had many, many children, and my mother was taken aback by their honesty.

My father was very fortunate. He came here illegally by 'jumping ship' in Florida, since people from southern Europe were banned. He managed in a few years, to open the only restaurant that was open all night in N.Y.C. He was also the first person to enclose a restaurant kitchen in N.Y.C. or... so I was told.

He never forgot the poverty of his youth, and whenever there was someone in need of a job, they would be told to go to him. I laugh because he could be so indifferent to people's feelings, but never when it came to their pockets. He always helped others out, and many times to the chagrin of my mother.

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Dear Ryan,

The problem with the system, as with all beaurocracy, is that most of the money goes to pay the workers. Of course people need help, but if that help could be chanelled some way through a Church, where people volunteer their services, it would be better. The problem becomes though, what Church?

God Bless,

Zenovia

"I have a hard time ignoring the reality that there are injustices of an economic nature."

Capitalism is not just, but Justice cannot occur in this world. We have to wait for the New Jerusalem.

My family comes from poverty too, during the 1930s, my great-grandparents struggled greatly.

I would just say that there must be a distinction between true poverty and what's called poverty by some today. You know what true poverty is, but many young people look at a reduced luxury as poverty.

I've met a 20 yr old who can't afford an iPod or Cable TV when he was cut off from his parents' credit cards, he complained to high heaven how poor he was. But there was no struggle for the basics of life, which is what I consider to be poverty. Is that poverty as you know it?

To some families possums were a luxury.

As Belloc put it - industrial capitalism is the "attendant parasite" of socialism, and both are the result of not so much economic but theological errors.

Would that we had a Catherine Doherty or Dorothy Day in these times.

That may ultimately prove to be true. However, that does not absolve Christians of their responsibility to strive for justice, in accordance with Holy Scripture, and for Catholic Christians, in accordance with the teaching authority of the Church as well. Unfortunately, some Christians take your premise and conclude that it is OK to ignore the plight of the poor. One merely needs to take a Biblical concordance, look up the word poor, and read all the verses listed to realize such an attitude is completely opposed to God's will as revealed in Holy Scripture.

Ryan

Amos, chapter 5: