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But you choose to turn on the TV. You choose to create accounts on social media platforms.
You choose to read and participate.
You CHOSE to do that therefore you are to blame.
I read my local news online once per day in the morning.
I check the weather more often.
I do not do social media at all.
Great points and great advice. Yes, the majority who feel so out of whack are the same ones who willingly poison their minds with all the online and media junk. It's the same as feeding yourself gross fatty fast food instead of healthy food. It's a choice. You are what you eat (or consume mentally, visually, audibly).
We are turning into animals because of the media feed. 24 hour agenda filled news and crazy social media. I think society is really going to be bad from here on out. No stopping it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TMSRetired
But you choose to turn on the TV. You choose to create accounts on social media platforms.
You choose to read and participate.
You CHOSE to do that therefore you are to blame.
I read my local news online once per day in the morning.
I check the weather more often.
I do not do social media at all.
Me, too (although I do scan the national and world news once per day). And I also avoid the Politics & Other Controversies forum.
One of the main things that is different between humans and animals is the ability to study a situation, look at what various roads will result in various outcomes, and make a decision on our well being.
Animals live in the moment, they do not look to the future.
It is one of the things that has brought us this far.
At least animals voluntarily quarantine when sick or dying.
But they do plan for the future with storing foodstuffs for winter, raising offspring, migrating....
But I know what you mean. As humans, we should be able to plan from experience and learn from history, but .....
The best way to keep your sanity intact is to avoid the P&OC forum like the plague.
I laughed out loud when reading this post, it has been discussed to death as to the question of whether the P&OC forum can be a place to view anything more than the bellicose, and belligerent harangues of the usual suspects who post there. I admit I've been going there more often in these troubled times, but the conversations can sometimes be pretty revealing of our own biases and the fact that many would love to be in the exclusive company of those who always agree with them..But yeah, sometimes it gets the blood to boiling..
I laughed out loud when reading this post, it has been discussed to death as to the question of whether the P&OC forum can be a place to view anything more than the bellicose, and belligerent harangues of the usual suspects who post there. I admit I've been going there more often in these troubled times, but the conversations can sometimes be pretty revealing of our own biases and the fact that many would love to be in the exclusive company of those who always agree with them..But yeah, sometimes it gets the blood to boiling..
Not everyone agrees with each other on this forum, and that's cool. At the very least, everyone is respectful (and that's even cooler).
Last time I looked we've been animals for a million years or so.
Do you make chlorophyll in the sun? Or do you get your nourishment from the decay of organic matter?
Didn't think so.
I suppose I should re-explain what I mean. Animals can be exceedingly nice, certainly to each other and, in the case of dogs and some cats, intra-species to humans. Non-human animals don't do any of the following:
Education other than instinct-based and learning basic life skills from their mother or other animals;
Engage in artistic entertainment or viewing such entertainment;
Build cities or otherwise deliberately alter the environment to their needs or liking on a large and/or quasi-permanent scale;
Engage in religious worship, unless you consider fealty to an animal group leader to be such worship;
Have ceremonies for forming a monogamous pair, a/k/a weddings; or
Have formalized rituals for mourning death.
There are doubtless other activities I haven't listed, but most are subsets of the above. I find it very ill-advised, in response to a transitory pandemic with a very small death rate, to go "bam-bam-bam" and destroy what has taken decades, centuries or even millennia to build in the first place.
From my little corner of the world, I think we are becoming more human/humane. It's heartwarming to see the instances of kindness during this awful pandemic. Back in the spring, to hear the town police cars and fire engines driving past the house of a little kid who was having a birthday with no guests allowed. It happened almost every day and those little kids were absolutely thrilled to have real fire engines with sirens blaring just for them, to see the police cars with the officers waving and flashing the lights. That's when the virus numbers were through the roof in March and April.
And as the numbers subsided during the summer, people were still nicer than they were before. Always saying, "Stay safe" and being more kind and considerate. But numbers are high again now. It's almost winter. Will we still be kind and helpful to others? Animals would be fighting over food but humans have compassion for others and there's the feeling of all of us being in this together. It's like a war but this time our only weapons are masks, hand sanitizer, social distancing, and just plain staying indoors and isolated a lot. We humans can think and imagine a future so we use our weapons and we follow the guidance of our governors and look for the light at the end of the tunnel when there will be a vaccine.
I know there are always a few who fall to the lower human instinct, bordering on animalistic. The people who are just out for themselves. We have some who have wrecked it for everyone else by their selfish behavior and some states have a lot of people like this. But most people around here willingly follow the rules because this is like a war and we need to stick together. This pandemic, in a rotten way, has brought us closer together.
From my little corner of the world, I think we are becoming more human/humane. It's heartwarming to see the instances of kindness during this awful pandemic.****
I know there are always a few who fall to the lower human instinct, bordering on animalistic. The people who are just out for themselves. We have some who have wrecked it for everyone else by their selfish behavior and some states have a lot of people like this. But most people around here willingly follow the rules because this is like a war and we need to stick together. This pandemic, in a rotten way, has brought us closer together.
That is definitely a bright side of the pandemic, a silver lining. Kindness may in many cases be accentuated.
There are problems, however. Organized culture and education are suffering.Educational and other inequalities are enhanced. That is a problem. As I pointed out on a Zoom conference with the clergy at my synagogue, one of whom went to Amherst, the other Middlebury, parents such as theirs would stop at nothing to make sure their children received an actual education. Children subjected to this sorry excuse called "remote learning" or "hybrid learning" are falling behind.
Let's hope the lessons in kindness trump the disadvantages.
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