This is one of the things that shouldn’t need repeating. Yet it seems to be a perennial problem. No sooner is one edge tacked down than another one gets away.
It’s a general principle. Essentially, there ARE no principles that apply to everybody’s emotions. For example, when I hear of a tragedy, my first response is NOT anger. I don’t CARE who, (if anybody), is responsible. I don’t want revenge. I don’t want anybody ‘punished’. I may want people to lose positions where they have any sort of power over others…but then, I never believed that such positions should exist anyway.
What I feel in the event of tragedies is always the same–sadness, an attempt to find out what happened a why, and a desire to figure out how such things can be prevented from happening again, if that is possible. I don’t feel a moment of anger. I almost always limit my anger for inanimate objects which I can’t make work the way I want them to. And I shouldn’t give in to anger about that sort of thing, either–I’ve broken too many things that way.
The fact is, I have no use for anger. I don’t want it. I believe it is always disabling, and may end up being fatal, if indulged in too often. It worries me terribly when I see people cultivating and deliberately evoking anger and impatience. I fear that they will suffer ill health effects–if not from hypertension, then from other biomedical stresses–including accidents caused by loss of control and/or dexterity.
In this, I gather, I’m not in the majority. That’s fine–as long as commentators don’t argue that ‘everybody’ feels the same way.
The most important way that people cause me pain by assuming that ‘everybody’ feels the same way about things, however, has to do with weather reports. It’s not just that I don’t consider the same kinds of weather ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’ or, for that matter, ‘bad’ as other people. I can make the translation, and though it pains me, I do.
What’s really a torment is when people tell me that the weather will be truly inclement–the sort of weather in which I would refuse to go outdoors at all, if I have ANY choice in the matter–and then cheerily exhort me to ENJOY the torment. Or, less seriously, they may describe weather that seems just about ideal to me–and then try to make me unhappy about it. These are the sort of things that make me beg people not to tell me how I’m going to respond emotionally to the weather–with very little lasting effect.
Then there are things that aren’t argued openly, but are tacitly included in decisions about what is covered, and what isn’t, in news coverage. Thus, for example, I don’t want to see another reporter standing in front of living things dying by the thousands, and telling me there have been no deaths. Or telling me about ‘structures’, when living things are in imminent peril.
Nor do I want to hear about ‘trees and power poles falling’. The two are not remotely related. When a power pole falls, it usually causes inconvenience (and only sometimes real danger)–but power poles can be reerected. Trees, when they fall, almost always DIE. There are gladsome exceptions–but too often it’s the end of a very long life. And by treating the two as equivalent, some very false values are espoused, often without any intention to do any such things.
On the other hand, I DO want to hear about things that happen outside the US. Unlike, it seems to be too glibly assumed, most people, I don’t feel a need to have nationalistic reasons to care about something. I don’t believe, for example, that only ‘Americans’ are real people; that only they have families, or lives they don’t want to lose, or anything else of importance. If a building collapses in a ‘foreign’ land, it’s not subject to different gravitational laws, or physical laws; nor is it less dangerous to those below the falling structures. A train wreck outside the US is not less dangerous. Storms, heat waves, droughts. floods, blizzards… There are catastrophes that are more common in the US than in most places. Tornadoes come at once to mind. They occur elsewhere, but they’re commonest in the US. There are places with problems rarely found in the US (in the US, for example, telephone poles can mostly be made of wood, and probably won’t be destroyed by termites once a year or so.
But by treating ‘the whole country’ as if it were ‘the whole cosmos’, general problems tend to be untraceable. For example, I shouldn’t have had to find out from the Journal of The British Interplanetary Society that in 1997, Indonesia suffered such terrible wildfires that it had a significant impact on weather in large parts of the world. This sort of thing falls under the heading of ‘need to know’, WHEREVER the recipient might be living at the time.
For today’s more obscure question, it occurred to me to wonder (and I may have seen it before), whether it was true that feathers were modified scales. Looking it up, I find that they are. But it’s not one of those searches that comes back with millions of hits, even so. So I’ll put it in here as a mnemonic.
treraia 