Is Gossip Good for Your Health?

If knowledge is power, then gossip is powerful currency, traded daily on high school phone lines and at the supermarket check-out lines.

"The best piece of gossip always has a little hint of scandal involved," says Paula Froelich, a columnist for the New York Post's "Page Six." "And it's also pretty salacious. And at some point your mouth drops and you go, 'oh no she didn't!'"

While Mom always said "No one loves a busybody," some scholars believe gossip is a healthy, essential tool in helping people work together and defining the rules of the tribe.

I guess ABC had to have some kind of "me too" article to follow up the one from Aug. 16 published by the NYT.

My husband, however, had more to say. He's a reporter himself so he knows that they can do better than this: they just chose not to do so to serve their liberal, brainwashing agenda. You can tell he drips with sarcasm.

If I read a lot of gossip literature (i.e., scandal sheets past and present), can I can be a scholar too? Just because one has crammed his head with all sorts of knowledge doesn't mean he has any wisdom. "If we listen we can learn what people find offensive or what people find acceptable" is a recipe for anarchy! That's why democracies unchecked by unchanging wisdom are doomed to spiral into chaos.

Outrage and scandal today becomes ho-hum tomorrow. Unwed motherhood is less taboo today and a "curable" condition with "enlightened" application of medicine. Unborn children and the incapacitated are "terminated" "for their own sake." After all, what quality of life could unwanted children and the seemingly vegetative possibly have? And they're so blasted inconvenient!

Why didn't this reporter bother to find out what those stick-in-the-mud Fundamentalist extremists have to say from their quaint book of fables called the Holy Bible? (Quoting a right-wing wacko's rantings typically warrants comment (i.e., balance) from a modern-thinking "scholar.") Oh I know, those world-is-black-and-white dreamers would probably babble about gossip being a "sin" and a "slippery slope" to chaos -- blah, blah, blah. The reporter certainly had time to consult a columnist, a Egyptologist and a psychologist. Certainly, someone must have been awake at the time in Colorado Springs or Salt Lake City.

Ironically, listening to these "experts" expound on the "healthy" role gossip plays in determining moral offensiveness and acceptabiliity is doing just that, guiding us away from Mother's "ignorant scoldings" and toward "enlightened" group-think.

"She said .., then I said ..., then he said ...." or "The LORD said ...."

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