Comments on: Many ways to do the right thing.

By: abfh

abfh — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 16:49:00 +0000

I once knew a woman who had been born with six fingers on one of her hands. The extra finger was surgically removed soon after birth. Apparently this is common practice and is done for no other reason than to make a child fit in better with his or her peers.

Social conformity really frightens me when it extends to such things as cutting perfectly healthy fingers off newborn babies, just so that they will all look alike.

By: ballastexistenz

ballastexistenz — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 15:10:00 +0000

I still don’t know either.

I recently had a conversation with someone who was convinced that “contributing to society” meant “making money through paid employment”, period, end of story.

Actually I have a lot of conversations with people who think that, or, as you say, think they think that.

This person referred to people like me, as sitting around feeling good about ourselves without actually doing anything to earn our money, or something like that.

I remember thinking their description sounded an awful lot like some (certainly not all) rich people I’ve known — thinking they’re better than other people without having actually done anything to earn that money. But somehow they’re okay, and people on government assistance are not.

By: elmindreda

elmindreda — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 12:32:00 +0000

Very nicely put, but I still don’t know how to get through to someone who thinks xe equates human value with the amount of money the person generates (“thinks” because people tend to make all sorts of exceptions, but refuse to generalise from them).

By: Bronwyn G

Bronwyn G — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 20:21:00 +0000

That was really powerful!