You Are What You Say - More!

A few more things that I missed out in the previous post.

A. Coffee-drinking - the next social stigma
I was asked at the dentist's whether I drank a lot of coffee because of some stains on my teeth. The dentist asked this in an apologetic manner. A couple of years ago (or maybe a little more before) it would have been: do you smoke a lot?

Coffee has a lot of stuff going against it - it is intoxicating, odorous, may be harmful, and what's more, popular too! Two decades down the line, the kid next door will say: hey mister, would you please mind not drinking that?

Anything that could possibly give on pleasure must be stigmatized; at least don't do it in public! After coffee, it would be chocolates...

B. Making Fun Not = Having Fun
Constant criticism, even if done by way of casual jokes, does not advance a relationship. We need to accept people as they are; faults are acceptable, let people be. Do not always try to correct.

C. Egalitarian Vegetarianism
Shouldn't vegetarian mean only vegetables/plant-products? After all the term is not non-dead-animal products nor is it non-killed stuff. Some people would choose to define it that way, because otherwise it would mean no milk, no chocolates! Some vegetarians take the "will-not-kill-anything-even-if-to-live" line of reasoning. Well, we have to accept it like you have to have money to make money, only life can sustain life.

D. Religious Intolerance & Smoking
This one is outright biased, opinionated, founded on coincidence, even propagandistic - I have not even checked the facts! :-)

There is growing unrest and intolerance, rising religious tensions, in the world today. Also less tobacco usage. Could the two be linked? The Holy Wars (Crusades) ended after the arrival of tobacco. Being intolerant and rude to smokers is socially acceptable nowadays. If you agree with that, then you must also agree that religious intolerance ought to be acceptable - if you worship your god, it would harm my god!

Oh my god, that was a straw-man argument if ever there was one! What an unashamed attempt at blatant self-justification? "Well, I am right and you are wrong, so you should not do whatever it is you are doing, even if it does you good, because I have a right to protect myself and I believe it is wrong and could harm me. So please stop. STOP IT!"

E. Anachronistic phrases
On a related note (to E. above). Stuff like dialing a number (remember when the phones had rotary dials?), hang up and so on. There were more examples, I can't recall now...maybe in a later post...(I wish!)

- Thomas Jay Cubb

From the cradle to the grave
Go the cowardly and the brave
The good die young, some unsung
While the evil live and thrive
The skull and bones, touch wood,
Might do you good!

Only when a man dies.
Do we realize
There are no why's
All just a roll of the dice.

(untitled, unedited poem... please excuse!)