I Am Officially A Bad Person (P.S. Don't Forget The Turtle Pond)

I'm right now at my snarkiest, most judgmental and crankiest.

Thank you, ABC.

We (my sister and I) just watched Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

If you haven't seen this week's "The Holmes Family" just skip this recap and go about your business. If you have seen it, please feel free to enter my comments section and tell me how small-minded, uncharitable, bitchy and evil I am. You won't be saying anything I haven't told myself, but I probably need to hear it again.

There. With the preamble out of the way, allow me to get this off my chest. I have never been more down on this show than I am today. There are a lot of people in this world who struggle through life. Who wait tables from the time they are 16 to put themselves through college, then work a series of jobs with middling salaries to achieve some token form of the American Dream. They are teachers, nurses, firemen, policemen, secretaries, engineers. There are doctors who have hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from med school but choose to practice in small towns for little money. There are attorneys with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt who choose to practice in Legal Aid clinics.

We're building a house for an ex-crackhead. Who didn't even clean up of her own volition. (As would I) she opted for the deep blue sea of rehab (paid for by the state) instead of the devil of prison. Yeah, I'm being small-minded. We can, of course, make a case for the fact that she's clean and sober now and has a sign in her front yard announcing the fact that she'll give away stuff that other people have donated to her. See, I can't even make a case for this woman without being irritated by her "charity". It's not even called "Helping Hand" or "Loving Arms" or "The BreadBasket". She named it after herself. Whoooo.

Anyway, not only do we build her a huge house, we do this in a neighborhood so crime-ridden that the behind the scenes scuttlebutt at TWOP is that they had to populate the reveal with show interns and build staff.
It sounds all well and good, but this new mansion is located directly adjacent to a disreputable package store/night club smack dab in the middle of a high crime, dilapidated community (in fact, the EM:HE RV is parked-and guarded-in the Club 436 night club parking lot). Here's hoping that there is a bomb-diggity alarm system or else every thug within a few block radius will carry off a plasma tv says one of the commenters who lives a few miles away.

Not only was this a less-than-stellar candidate to begin with, now they have gone and painted a huge "Rob Me" sign on her family of young children.

And then we have to sit through the endless talk about "helping her turn around from her mistake and build a better life." I'm glad she's clean and sober and able to be a mother to her kids. I'm not knocking that in the least. I'm just wondering why we aren't giving houses to women who've never done drugs in their life and didn't drop out of school in the 11th grade to 'hang out with the wrong crowd.'

I openly admit to watching this show for the snark value as much as anything else, but I think this is the first time that I can say I'm 100% down on the show's choice of family. I really think it would be a much more enjoyable show if they'd do less for each recipient and then spread their generousity across a larger number of people.

Then, to top everything else, after they deliver bags of frozen meat to people literally huddled in dilapidated shanties--Have some Chicken Fingers and then use the bag to stuff in the holes in the ceiling!--they spend time, money and effort to BUILD A FRIGGING TURTLE POND. Cause Lord knows the turtles need a home more than the crippled old starving guy.

Sorry. This has been a long-winded sort of rant. I'm disgusted with the show and further disgusted with myself for not being more "open-minded". I just wish that instead of going to school, educating myself and working really hard I had decided to get pregnant repeatedly, use drugs until the court told me to stop or go to jail, then run some half-assed "charity" where I gave away what other people gave me (after putting my name on everything). Then, when some third-rate window AC (no doubt donated to my "charity") burned down the house on which I didn't carry any insurance, someone would build me a house three times as large, stock it with the newest appliances, a jacuzzi tub and every other luxury imaginable.

Silly me, thinking that working hard and being responsible was the way to behave as an adult.