| QUOTEs Ken Carman, Lava
> Does society "owe us?" Do other individuals "owe us?"
>
> I would say mostly, "No," but a very significant amount of "Yes." My guess is Lava would disagree.
I'd quite agree with you on that. :)
> No survey or study could ever quantify the rightness or wrongness of
> these questions. How do you take a survey on the very subjective opinion,
> "We are all cry babies at heart?" You can't.
yes you can, easily. You ask people how they reacted in the face of their most difficult problems. Did they sit and figure out how to address them, decide they coudlnt, then look for sources of help? Or did they cry and hope someone else would come do it for them, then go get drunk?
I still say we are at heart crybabies :)
> An employer who sees that we are working hard, doing our best for their
> company, owes us more than they owe to another lazy employee who
> doesn't do their work but sucks up to them.
>
> To accept a lesser standard is to sanction evil.
Is it really evil to say that the employer owes us precisely what they agreed to owe us? Ie x dollars a week? I know its pretty annoying to see employers favouring sycophants, but they dont actually _owe_ us something over and above what they agreed to pay us and give to us in other ways.
> Relatives owe us, as adults, the decency not interfering or and
>micro-managing our lives: to stop treating us as if we were five years old.
>Continued verbal or physical abuse is unacceptable. We shouldn't be living
>off of each other. Charity or is OK, but not to be expected. Loans are a
>form of charity, in a sense, and must be repaid. Treating a relative like a
>bank or a pawn shop is also unacceptable.
>
>To accept a lesser standard is to sanction evil.
Clearly thats one opinion, and a fair enough one, but I'm not sure why you brand people with any other opinion as evil :)
> We work best as a collective, not as a society that says, "You are
> responsible for yourself, stop whining, cry baby."
Different people work best difering ways, we're not mental carbon copies. I learnt that at age 6 when I gave up trying to make any sense of the teacher's incomprehensible method of spelling, and made up my own. Suddenly I learnt to spell! I went from a spelling retard to scoring first and second. When I do research projects I work best alone. When I studied at school I learn best from books and experiments, not classes. These kinds of differences in personality type and learning technique are well known in relevant established circles.
<snip story of failure>
> This is a classic case of a man who should pick "himself up by his own
> bootstraps."
This pattern is well known, and it is known that such people can not solve such problems themselves.
> But after half a century of repeating the same patterns over and over,
> reinforced by his parents, telling him to stop being a "cry baby" will solve
> nothing.
Right, it never does. For some reason we have to figure that bit out ourselves. Then we make progress!
>What he really needs is his own personal, caring yet tough,
>counselor that will help him beyond this pattern and into a slightly better
>future. It would take someone with the professional training and the right
>mix between compassion and tough love.
I work with these kind of people and have never met even one that has suceeded in turning their life around by working with a counsellor. The counsellor approach is a guaranteed failure, the fad of the day.
>Many of these true stories magnify that, even with the best of efforts, some
>of us will fail not because of some fault in ourselves but because of people
>who continue to kick you down to the ground while telling you to stop being
>a "cry baby."
At least lets be clear I never advocated that, neither the kicking nor telling people to stop being crybabies. I would advocate some ways that encourage people to figure it out for themselves.
Lava |