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Oct. 14th, 2019 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealThere's a famous quote called the Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
But I would add it's not enough to know the difference between things you can and cannot change; there are times when it's important to differentiate how you express them.
I may wish that certain politicians had never been elected. I might also wish that an obnoxious person in my life had never been born. (Let's say for the purposes of this example that I have a nemesis named Abner, this isn't actually the case.) Well, in neither case do I have the ability to retroactively change the past. But in the first case, I can and should take action to oppose incumbents' dangerous policies and work to support the policies I believe in. On the other hand, if I express aloud, "I wish Abner had never been born," I might get some weird looks, and if I say "I wish Abner had never been born, and I'm going to do something about it at 3 pm on Thursday," I might get in trouble.
By the same argument, it's possible that there are people out there who wish I had never been born--and unpleasant as it might be to me, they have the right to that belief.
If, however, they choose to express it repeatedly, in messages to the effect of "gosh, it's a real shame that you exist" or "that the recorded history of events conspired to bring you to birth is an utter travesty" or suchlike, I also have the right to cut ties with them.
Now, it's possible that people who have these sentiments don't recognize the necessary implications of them, but it's also possible that people think longer than two seconds before they let words come out of their mouth, and I prefer to assume that people are thinking.
("But Ember, aren't you terrible at deciphering the obvious consequences of your own communication sometimes too?" Well...if other people are such geniuses, let them. It's sort of a cursed-if-I-do, cursed-if-I-don't.)
I may wish that certain politicians had never been elected. I might also wish that an obnoxious person in my life had never been born. (Let's say for the purposes of this example that I have a nemesis named Abner, this isn't actually the case.) Well, in neither case do I have the ability to retroactively change the past. But in the first case, I can and should take action to oppose incumbents' dangerous policies and work to support the policies I believe in. On the other hand, if I express aloud, "I wish Abner had never been born," I might get some weird looks, and if I say "I wish Abner had never been born, and I'm going to do something about it at 3 pm on Thursday," I might get in trouble.
By the same argument, it's possible that there are people out there who wish I had never been born--and unpleasant as it might be to me, they have the right to that belief.
If, however, they choose to express it repeatedly, in messages to the effect of "gosh, it's a real shame that you exist" or "that the recorded history of events conspired to bring you to birth is an utter travesty" or suchlike, I also have the right to cut ties with them.
Now, it's possible that people who have these sentiments don't recognize the necessary implications of them, but it's also possible that people think longer than two seconds before they let words come out of their mouth, and I prefer to assume that people are thinking.
("But Ember, aren't you terrible at deciphering the obvious consequences of your own communication sometimes too?" Well...if other people are such geniuses, let them. It's sort of a cursed-if-I-do, cursed-if-I-don't.)
