Roseanne's Excuse for Her Racist Tweet about Valerie Jarrett

When I first heard the news about Roseanne's ugly and inexcusable tweet yesterday and read it myself, I was surprised that once the shock and reprehension wore off, I was left with one overarching thought: This woman needs help.

This wouldn't have been my reaction a decade ago. Back in my 20s, I didn't give my sympathy to anyone whom I judged undeserving of it. This was before I started reading books about how to deal with difficult personalities. This was before I realized someone I deeply loved, my own mother, had one, and was herself capable of saying and doing terrible things and not remembering them, of providing a convenient list of reasons her medications were to blame for those terrible things to make the burden of committing them easier to live with the day after.

My mother was a longtime user of Ambien and, I'll admit, the side effects of the medication with her were powerful and unnerving. Entire conversations, activities and arguments lost to the abyss of prescription sleep. I would never under any circumstances, however, consider those conversations a wash, even if she couldn't recall them. That medication might be a reason for the environment in which words and ideas are expressed, but as Sanofi, the company that makes Ambien, so cleverly expressed in their response to Roseanne's leaning on the pill as an accomplice, a pill does not type 41 characters on a keyboard and hit "tweet."

Roseanne does not deserve my sympathy for a few reasons. First, this incident is not isolated. She has a long history of incendiary remarks. Second, she has made remarks since the incident in question that inconsistently express remorse at best, and consistently express anger and frustration at the repercussions at worst. Lastly, my first thought may have been, Roseanne Barr needs help, but my next thought was this: She has to be willing to seek help herself. Clearly, this is not the case. Racism (couched as a bad joke) may not be a medical condition, like insomnia with a pill to swallow, but a person who suffers from it can choose to change, identify hurtful feelings, thoughts and actions, and adopt healthy, kind ways of seeing and treating others. Sadly, this has not been the case for Roseanne. Instead, the aftermath of her tweet has been a very hard pill for her to swallow.

No, Roseanne doesn't deserve my sympathy, but I've given it to her anyway, because, as the lawyer, politician and orator Robert Ingersoll is famous for writing: "In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences." Here, in society—what we all hope is above nature, but often isn't—the most visceral of chords has been struck. And though it's in human nature to punish and reward, it feels more honest for me to supplant my judgement of her with a detached sympathy for her inability to help herself, and let the consequences do the rest. She has already felt their wrath like shock waves throughout her personal and professional circle. People have lost jobs because of her. Her friendships will be tested and, from the looks of it, may not survive. I just hope one consequence of all this will be that others who blame ancient biases and bad behaviors on medications will think twice before writing, speaking, or tweeting them and think long and hard about therapy, compassion, and personal responsibility. As Ingersoll also wrote: "Give to every human being every right you claim for yourself."