Byron Davis
Regis University College for Professional Studies
“Neat People vs Sloppy People” by Suzanne Britt is article relating the sloppy people to being morally supreme to neat people. Britt explains that in her experience neat people are lazy and mean. She states that this is directly related to how they excuse the little messes of the world, and cold heartedly throw them in the trash can. Britt cites many instances in which sloppy people are the way they are out of love, and neat people are neat because they do not know how to love. According to Britt this is her way of affirming to herself that her being sloppy is not a problem but a personal attribute that people should be aspiring to develop.
Britt explains in the first block of her article that sloppy people are creative, noble and loving. She explains they live in a Never-Never land, a land in which creativity thrives. She insinuates the mess is not a mess it is a muse. Piles of magazines, messy desks and unorganized books are the oil that gets the gears moving inside a sloppy persons head. She explains the sloppy people keep old newspapers around because sloppy people care too much to throw them away. Britt also mentions that family pictures and postcards are not yet in a scrapbook because sloppy people are too noble and aim to high and wide to ever complete such a task. Clearly she has many instances in which she relates sloppiness to the positive side of the moral spectrum.
Suzanne in her second block describes neat people as morally incompetent people because they operate on two rules never use anything twice and throw everything away. She mentions that have no love for mail, church bulletins, coupons or pleas. Neat people simply find no use for mail other than bills and after the bills have been taken care of they too deserve to go into the trash. Lacking a caring feeling of any kind they throw away birthday
References: Britt, Suzanne. "Neat People vs. Sloppy People." Ed. X. J. Kennedy, Dorothy M. Kennedy, and Jane E. Aaron. The Bedford Reader. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin 's, 2009. 233-38.