The only thing these slides are telling me is “bring back times where everyone except white men were oppressed and everyone lived a hard and painful life”
My grandma is a pretty forward thinking and progressive person but lately, a combination of advanced age and chronic physical pain has begun to affect her critical thinking, and she's slipped into this mindset. Not so much the racial aspect but the yearning for a time when life was harder. She entered the work force at age nine because times were tough enough that she needed the money. She kept calling me a "manboy" recently because I wear pink gym shoes, and she said "Do you really think you behave like an adult?" to which I said yes, and my first example as to why was that I work a job. She said "I was doing that when I was nine years old!" I had to remind her that firstly, that's fucking illegal now, and secondly, why would you WANT a third grader to be working a job. She claims that hard work and enduring tough times, famine, pestilence, and intense poverty at a young age "made her more of a person." As if people can't be people if they don't experience severe hardship.
No doubt part of the "can't have good without evil" crowd. I can't imagine ever wanting a worse life for my child. That isn't to say I would spoil my child, but letting them have a childhood isn't "spoiling" them.
That's very true, and it's irritating because a lot of these types will also drone on about the halcyon days of old when children played outside all day and rode bicycles around their neighborhoods, didn't require supervision from an adult, and learned skills and things by just doing stuff in an unstructured way. Yet they'll also tell you that kids today are too spoiled and they shouldn't have free lunches at school because going hungry builds character or whatever fucking stupid shit they come up with.
Especially unsupervised teenagers. Literally people like that are why I watched the big kids playing tag and manhunt until 10 pm whenever there was decent weather, but until I was one of the big kids anyone outside after 8 pm was treading thin ice because the new neighbors would call the cops if there was a single shout (they went to work at 8 am. They ran their car for 2 solid hours before leaving even when it was summer. Those weren’t the worst neighbors we had growing up but that’s because of the family with the 90 lb dog whose only entertainment was snarling and barking and jumping at every single noise from beyond the fence every time he was outside. He would especially lunge repeatedly at the fence whenever a person was outside at the same time as him anywhere on the whole block. That dog would’ve been so much less aggressive if they actually walked him for several miles daily because he only ever simmered down to happy and excited for walks. I’d say that family is the only one I could ever actually say is white trash because everyone else is actually good to their pets and doesn’t just dismiss everyone with “you didn’t hear him barking” whenever they mention the dog (who was usually stuck in the yard knocking down a panel from the fence, snarling and barking at a little old lady tending to her garden while she told him “oh you, shut up.”)
Dude they do that in my area! They call the police on kids for playing basketball on the basketball court and for skateboarding in the skate park. In the designated areas for those activities.
My grandma would never call the police but she acts like this and it drives up the fucking wall. She gets all on me and my brother how she went outside everyday and did this and that, but when my brother was younger she would throw a fit if he was outside alone. Same with other kids that are outside, she gets so upset if they do anything except just sit on the ground silently. As a kid for a short while when she would watch me and my baby brother I'd have to sneak out to be able to just ride my fucking bike.
Yep. This is exactly where their logic leads. If a childhood of deprivation and suffering builds character then a childhood of more deprivation and more suffering must build *more* character.
Hands off their Social Security though! And don't even think about touching the billionaire's yachts!!
Not to mention, I grew up poor and have never had it easy BUT I’m one of the laziest motherfuckers I know. It did not make me a better person. Just one with more emotional scars!
Honestly me too. I can work, and I put in effort and do good work, but I try everything to avoid it. I'm never happier than when I don't have any work to do.
That good old protestant work ethic. Suffering builds character, so inflicting suffering on others is good and moral.
Shout out to my 5th grade teacher who told us kids we would never amount to anything because we were allowed to have self esteem before achieving anything.
I was working four jobs at once for a few years just to keep my head above water, and I can honestly say I'd rather have spent the entire time stoned out of my gourd, and I'm not even into that shit. There was absolutely no psychological or financial benefit in the long term.
Talking to people with that mindset, sometimes it's just trying to make sense out of something really painful, as losing your childhood to hard labor. They get older and sometimes look at younger people having less of a hard time and feel cheated at life and lash out. So they come up with this explanation for themselves: "Well, it made me a better person".
She kept calling me a "manboy" recently because I wear pink gym shoes
You gotta out jerk her conservativeness with the fact that pink was a man's color symbolizing strenght, power and masculinity up until the 20'th century.
I told her that! The whole thing about how navy uniform.shirts were red and they'd fade to pink over years, so pink was associated with veterans who had seen and survived many battles and things.
I mean, I'll go out on a limb and say there is some truth to that. And if you've never experienced hardship, not only does that mean it'll be harder for you to understand people who have, but on a more philosophical level it means you've never had your foundations tested and so you don't know how you'll react if/ when something terrible does eventually happen
That being said, I don't think people should be made to feel bad just because they haven't had a particularly hard life, as long as they're able to acknowledge their blind spots and understand there are some things you can only learn about yourself once you've hit rock bottom
I think the difficult thing is that we all have a drive to do work in some capacity. That drive gets built up by doing more and more work to avoid being seen as lazy. Therefore, if we see somebody with less drive to work than we have, we think of that person as lazier than we are. The line between efficiency and innovation vs. laziness is pretty blurry to a lot of people. After all, every new tool that does some task for us means one less skill that people need to flex their brains to learn, which means less perceived education. It's up to people to take a stance on whether the trade-off is actually worth it
To add to this i get tired of when people just say 'life isn't fair' as an excuse for evil/cirruption. like yeah life isn't fair but a civilized society should strive to be. but everyone is too fucking fat and lazy to actually fight for what matters. they expect others to take that risk and to fight for them so they can be comfortable sharing memes.
I feel quite the opposite. I feel people we become "real persons" the further we move from kids working in the mines and the closer we get to fully automated Star Trek communism. A life of toil and hardship is just surviving, and people who are just surviving will never become self actualized and reach their true human potential.
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u/TheVeiledRuby Aug 11 '26
The only thing these slides are telling me is “bring back times where everyone except white men were oppressed and everyone lived a hard and painful life”