“This is why I find so much of recent personal writing tiresome: It’s too often defined by melodrama, humorlessness, and excessive self-pity…The kind of pieces where the writer seems to have given up ...

Pity is improper if we have the power to alleviate suffering. Doctors who can cure their patients do not pity them. Similarly, it is improper for the president who can help the homeless to pity them.