Intervention

Intervention Discussion Questions

Instead of having the complications of two generations having fights with each other and not seeing eye to eye on everything, we have one generation trying to figure out what is going on in their lives and fighting about that. In "Intervention", there isn't much of a fight going on between Marilyn and Sid except for the fact that she hides that she doesn't like his drinking habit anymore. Sid keeps calm the entire time when he is confronted by his children and wife about his problem, but he never has a problem with his wife. Instead of fighting about differences of two different generations, we have in this story the different views of the two people in the same generation. Marilyn use to drink when she was younger but stopped after she realized she had a problem, Sid doesn't stop drinking because he seems to think he doesn't have a problem and although Marilyn thinks he does, she never says anything because of how he has treated her their whole lives.

In "Intervention", we also have the problem of the same generation problems within the children when at first Tom disagreed with his sister Sally about Sid having a drinking problem. Tom soon realizes that his dad does have a problem and agrees with Sally and her husband Rusty to try to take care of it and fix it. They don't see the problem the same way their mom sees it and so they try to fix it in a way that they know how to instead of a way of how their parents might go about fixing it. This problem then clashes with what Marilyn wants and causes a problem of what she should have done instead of what she did do.

The word enabler is used in this story in a negative aspect because Rusty believes that Marilyn is only helping Sid keep his problem of drinking instead of trying to do something about it. Marilyn never tries to help Sid with his problem and keeps letting him drink no matter how drunk he gets or how bad of a driver he is, she will always let him drive, and she won't fix the matter because she wants to think that there isn't a problem with him.