I love that whenever something really awful happens to you, they try to justify it by saying, "God never gives you more than you can handle."
I know people who have been driven batsh*t insane by what God has given them.
If there is a god he is an asshole and doesn't deserve worship. I heard he's the bastard that lets all those children die all the time!
Presumably, people who say that have never read the Bible.
They hide their inhumanity behind some magical sky wizard with a greater plan and misconstrue their privilege as strength of character and confidence.
I made this connection a month ago - that a couple of generations of humans grew up breathing exhaust from leaded gasoline and dust from lead paint and had a bit of an epiphany about the state of the world.
Dude. As a whole the world is stupider by several tens of IQ points solely in specifically due to lead poisoning.
Lead poisoning is the single most detrimental effect ever experienced by humanity so very few people even understand that!
Makes me wonder if we're not undergoing something similar. I imagine that a lot of people didn't know the effects it'd have on them when those things were first introduced
Plastics are the modern lead.
Having made that connection, how does it feel about the criticisms we have toward our previous generation? I say this being born in the late 80s, so my folks are from this generation, although I can say at least 50% of them somehow escaped the associated issues, which to me I wonder if there's some genetic predispotion, and widespread, to exposure to lead causing essentially cognitive disabilities.
Anyway, if you buy into this (and I do), were essentially chastising this generation for fucking our shit up, knowing full well they have intellectual disabilities. And I have no idea what their OG knew about lead exposure, or when we learned about its effects on the majority of the population, so I'm not trying to point fingers at the moment.
But we essentially have a generation of mentally handicapped people, who because of their handicap have terrible reasoning skills, and me and you and our generation point our fingers at them and say you're fucking our shit up. It's like that Mitch Hedberg joke, Dammit Otto, you're an alcoholic: dammit Otto, you have lupus.
Just rambling. Perhaps I had a little exposure myself. I just don't want to assume the worst in people, that they're knowingly fucking our shit up. They just don't know better.
Your philosophical dilemma is valid, but I would point out that pointing fingers is the best choice we have in this matter. Say, indeed, the ones fucking shit up do have intellectual disabilities, they still continue doing it. Reprimanding them for it is perhaps society's way of trying to get them to stop. Sort of like in the case of a child I guess - children being considered in this argument as having not enough understanding of the consequences of their actions. Equate, if you will, 'goddamn it Billy, stop running in the street' to 'goddamnit grandma, stop voting for idiots'.
The problem then is that Billy may listen, but grandma is set in her ways and has the notion that age brings wisdom regardless, so she's less inclined to listen to what the equivalent of Billy for her has to say.
I see no alternatives for this (that is to say, an attempt to correct erroneous behaviour) in the context of the aspirations of modern society.
As a thought experiment, in the most extreme case, what would we do? Test everyone for lead and remove, for example, the right to vote across a certain threshold? That doesn't take into account the baseline intellectual ability of individual (which can vary across a population) and the degree to which said discovered lead levels would affect them. It's entirely possible that a lead-laden 'smart' brain still has more capability than a pure but idiotic one. Not sure how we'd ever assess that. Not to mention the system would be exploited as soon as possible to channel power.
We could of course, stop pointing fingers and forgive them, for they know not what they do, and it'd probably have about the same effect.
I imagine the next generation will involve Zoomers corrupted by microplastics and mercury.
But we're the plastic generation...
That's certainly something that may have a significant impact on the future.
Microplastics, BPAs, PFAs... We're screwed.
If they were assholes due to Lead poisoning theyd be sympathetic to a nonzero degree. But the reality is that they have no one to blame but themselves.
I mean, almost everyone who grew up in a large city from the 40s-80s was a victim to lead poisoning and other toxic chemicals (hell, lead in gasoline was officially banned in 96!). Doesn't absolve them of sin but you've got to feel a little sorry for how little emotional control it can leave someone with.
And then how long does it take for decades of lead from exhaust on basically every roadside and garage in the world to make its way through the ground, into the groundwater, into water supplies and crops, into people and animals, and ... back into the ground again.
"Everywhere" should be a superfund site.
Sherwin shouldn't have made his paint so delicious
Lead Paint: Tasty but Deadly!
Leaded fuel or leaded pipes didn't matter to that generation, so why do their bigoted, stuck-up views still matter now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
There's reason to believe the very real crime spike in the 80s/90s was people from the 60s/70s quite literally going insane due to their lead exposure.
The survivors are both traumatized by the experience and suffering from a lower but still harmful dose of brain damage. They express this through short tempers and irrational anxiety, which they then rationalize as justification for bigotry.
Ie, going into hysterics when you see black people because your brain is polluted, but then reinforcing the anxiety with a nightly dose of Tucker Carlson.
The Lord works in mysterious ways!
Protestantism: "God is me!"
You had me, up until lead poisoning.
