When I was a kid, the saying “Sticks and stones will break my bones but names can never hurt me.” was the ‘law’ of Natural Selection.
It didn’t matter “why” someone said cruel things, it was our individual choice not to listen to them. That saying served as a powerful response to what is now considered “bullying”.
Let’s face it, people sometimes have bad days and have their own problems that they sometimes try to impose on the rest of us. But we aren’t supposed to be required to allow them to.
Young women experience wild mood swings once their hormones start flooding their bloodstreams. It was impressed upon me (and since to my granddaughters) that those feelings are our own to handle. To just release a whirlwind on the world, was/is NOT how we should handle it. That philosophy applies to our entire character. A familiar saying at my house is “deal with it”.
But there’s a strange turnabout in the “individual responsibility” genre these days. We are supposed to ‘guess’ why someone acts out, and after that, we’re supposed to respect, even support, the other person as if their emotional state has priority to your own.
First, when did we all become mind readers?
Secondly, why are we supposed to take responsibility for everyone else’s ‘feelings’ before our own?
Compassion doesn’t require an active response. We can ‘care’ without needing to ‘take care’ of others. By not getting ‘all up’ in their business we likely return them to their own empowerment. If they’re filled with self-pity, it doesn’t seem generous to feed that ‘beast’.
There’s a BIG difference between offering a smile, hug, or ‘helping hand’ to someone who’s struggling and bowing to (or enabling) someone else’s destructive behavior.
Aren’t we supposed to (allowed to) distinguish between someone in ‘real’ trouble and someone who is ‘playing the victim’? Sorry but IMHO those two kinds of people are not equally deserving of our concern. But somehow, the term ‘hater’ is thrown around when we don’t comply with, or reward, every single complaint.
Seems the patients have taken over the asylum, folks.
Our society is throwing individual responsibility and freedom overboard and replacing it with “group think” and “the collective”. Hope you know that those changes are a direct step toward Marxism.
Not good for you and not at all healthy for America.
The ‘adults’ who are left are the ones courageously just saying, “NO”.
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