baeuchlein on 14/12/2008 at 14:16

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Our convenience does not disgust me. I find it disgusting that many people from western countries do not want to help those less fortunate, or that some think we should join the poor in the mud rather than helping them up to our standards (or meet somewhere in between). It's not an easy task, but if you ask me, it has to be done (or at least, we should attempt to do it).



Realizing that the world is not perfect surely is an important thing, but whether comparatively small children should know of every harsh thing that's out there is another question. When discussing the Nazi dictatorship at school, we were shown pictures of people with their heads cut open and brains exposed and such, but that was not done when we were just eight years old. We were about fifteen when that was done.

You know, we visited some relatives last weekend. They had a small child, aged 18 months. Should I visit the child, beat her up and rape her, to show her that you cannot trust anyone in this world? Certainly not. And I won't show her pictures of mayhem or starving people either.

There's a time when young people have to know about the dark sides of the world, but you have to carefully select that time.



I'm not so certain about that, although you could still be right. Too much adversity, however, may stop you in your tracks as well. And it has been shown that too much pressure leads to stress and depression, and both of these are already a large problem for our society here. However, whenever doctors and other so-called experts speak about that, they give us the example of someone squeezed by his boss, getting to much stress and depression - and then they say, "the depressed has to learn how to stand all that stress", meaning: If he cannot stand it, it's his fault, and can never be the boss' fault. Several weeks ago, a radio moderator questioned this reasoning twice, but still the psychiatrist said, "no, erm, ahem, well, our experience shows that almost everytime it helps if the stressed person just tries to stand the stress more".

It's true that there are many problems out there which cannot be easily solved. It's true that people have to learn to face problems. But there's a line where this just gets too much for ordinary people, yet our society denies this.

It's true that there are people out there who have much larger problems, who are sick up to the point of dying, and of course we should help them. But we should not totally forget ourselves either, or we may loose our ability to help them or ourselves in the process, and that would not be beneficial to anyone.

BEAR on 14/12/2008 at 17:18

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I'll take a look at that.

In my previous post I'm really referring more to America than anything else. I say western countries but I don't really know enough about other places to wrap them up.

I worry about where America is going because our population, perhaps more than most others, is way to comfortable where it is. Kids don't excel at school, young people don't excel at college, we aren't training enough scientists and engineers. There is no sense of urgency, we've been on the top too long and we don't think we have to work to stay that way. There is nothing saying we need to be on top I don't think, but still it worries me, but its probably just the natural rhythm of things in the end.



Yeah, thats pretty much what I mean. I think perhaps there is a language barrier. I do sometimes wonder if our standard of living is even possible for the entire world, or whether our level of comfort requires that a certain number of people live in poverty to be continued.



Yeah, if you read my post again you'll see thats exactly what I'm advocating. Way to go out on a limb with your anti-raping and beating children stance.



It may just be a different world than we live in now. I look at Louis Armstrong and his upbringing, and how people like that found their way out of incredible hardship and did it with a smile on their face. We don't seem to see that kind of thing anymore, but that just might be how the world is, because I don't think people of that era were by their nature any better. As far as invention goes, I'm probably wrong since the amount of things that can still be discovered by personal ingenuity and struggle is a lot less than in the past. It takes a lot of money and large amounts of people to get much of anything done anymore, so that train has probably left the station.

Kolya on 14/12/2008 at 20:21

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I just didn't like that resigned talk about "the pendulum coming back around". And now that the "world is a pretty harsh place" it's "probably not a bad thing for children to realize this". That's not the way to fix it. :D

baeuchlein on 15/12/2008 at 16:35

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That may be the reason for me misunderstanding your previous post, for I mainly know Germany (and, from radio and TV broadcasts, some other countries in Europe), but America is far away from me. Unfortunately, our media mainly spoke about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain for almost a year now, and neglected many other aspects of the USA, let alone other american countries.



The situation is somewhat different here in Germany. There is a sense of urgency and so on, but mainly this urgency deals with economic competitors, not with the problems of the world in general. I think if we somehow managed to secure our economic position near the top of the world, people could easily think, "everything is okay and there's not much more to do", and by now I believe that's the attitude you're criticising here. And rightly so.



I think it's rather a different point of view than a language barrier, due to the fact that we live in different places of the world. Several people around here think along the lines, "if we just work harder and for less money, we can save our economy, and then everything is right". But I don't think it's right, then. There are enough problems of the world, which even threaten us, which cannot be solved by just "saving the economy". And I even doubt that we can "save our economy" by just "working harder", yet some of our political leaders still think that way, meaning we could even keep China at bay with that. Yeah, sure - 0.082 billions of Germans can stay ahead of 1.300 billions of Chinese by just working harder. And pigs can fly, my dear politicians.:grr:

And concerning our standard of living: Well, many people believe we can't keep it that high, either because it's based on things like slavery in third world countries or because our society is based in many places on cheap oil and cheap energy, and this is going to change in the near future. However, what exactly is wrong there and what needs to be done could easily fill several debates or one or more books. The world is not only a harsh place, but it's complicated as well.



I think I see it now, but misunderstood it the last time. That's why I overreacted and used this immense exaggeration. I wanted to make it absolutely clear that putting too much stress on young children (and people in general) does not solve all problems. Instead, it creates a new bunch of problems. Sometimes I get too emotional, I think.:tsktsk:



On the other hand, there may be a lot of people who silently went down, never to get up again. We shouldn't forget them.




I believe that, too. Furthermore, large amounts of money usually come from companies nowadays, and these companies want to get something in return, of course. And that means they're not likely giving money for basic research without any clear destination, but rather like to spend the money for research done in an area where these company can make profit, and where some research has already been done, meaning one can calculate or guess that it's likely that the research funded by the company will yield money for them in the end.

Unfortunately, that means we're even less likely to make big discoveries in the near future, because funds are going in another direction. In theory, a government could decide to fund some of the less-likely-to-be-profitable research topics, but in reality, there are various reasons restraining that idea very much.