It takes a special kind of scumbag to be a psychic. Seriously. I mean, your job is basically to manipulate people who are at a low point in their lives. Lonely, sad, desperate and terribly uneducated people are seduced by these charlatans intent on bilking them out of their hard earned money.
It’s easy to feel judgmental about the suckers, like the case of “Jane Doe”, defrauded to the tune of 250,000 dollars by Lisa Debbie Adams. A self professed psychic, Adams told her that a curse had been placed while she was still a baby inside her mother’s womb. Despite how utterly stupid that may seem to us, people like Jane are susceptible to these superstitions. In the end, Adams succeeded in convincing Jane to give her entire life savings in a series of increasingly wild spending sprees (including the “spiritual” benevolence of Mercedes-Benz, a feeling perhaps familiar to some owners).
Should we punish the ignorant? Shall we forget they are victims merely because they were vulnerable, improperly educated dolts who had the misfortune of falling for a scam artist? It’s a cruel world if we can’t feel at least some sympathy. Reading the stories of victims reminds me how easy it is to fool desperate people wanting any easy answer to solve their problem. It’s a sad reality, a reminder that reason – the shield that should have protected these people against fraud – was paper thin.
It’s time for us to ridicule psychics more, and I mean A LOT more. We need to expose them as the fraudsters and tricksters they are. There’s no need to make the belief in superstitions illegal; it’s far more affective to make it shameful, and object to ridicule. The funnier, the better. So you know what to do…