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It's hard to appreciate the emotional impact of something until you experience it
Saturday, 29 April 2006
When I was a young adult, the father of a friend of mine passed away. My friend had a very close relationship with his father, and was devastated. He went into a deep depression for a number of months.
My other friends and I did our best to understand, but after a while having someone around who was always down became a bit of a drag. We all started to think he should "get over it" and get on with his life. While we had great sympathy for him, it seemed he was letting it pull him down much further than he should. None of us dared say it, but we believed he was making more out of it than was there.
We all have to die sometime, we thought, so mourn and move on.
Years later, my own father passed away due to cancer. I went through the usual emotional roller-coaster - denial, anger, guilt, grief, depression. It was the first time someone so close to me had ever died, and it was a confronting event. Death can seem like a very abstract concept until it appears in your immediate vicinity.
I began to understand what my friend had been going through years before.
This is just the most poignant of a number of events that have taught me a very important lesson - it's difficult to appreciate the emotional impact of something until you experience it.
I used to be quick to judge the behavior and reactions of others to events. They should "stop acting like miserable gits", "stop looking for cheap sympathy", and "get over it". We all like to decide how much better we would deal with any situation, without really understanding what's going on.
You can see this behavior with the detachment people exhibit while watching horrific circumstances on television and in the movies.
"Don't do that you moron!" they yell at the screen. "Can't you see what's going to happen!"
You can also see it when people sneer at those beneath them. They certainly wouldn't make the choices that single mother on welfare does. If their wife was acting like his is, they'd soon put a stop to that. Their children just wouldn't be allowed to behave like that. There's no way they'd ever end up begging on the street.
When you're an observer of a situation, and not stuck right in the middle of it, it's very easy to judge others. It's one of human being's less dignified characteristics that we fall into this sanctimonious pattern so easily. It's a good way to get a cheap shot and feel superior at someone else's expense.
A few weeks back, I watched a documentary on television about the sex-slave trade in Eastern Europe. Young Ukrainian women were being lured to Turkey with the promise of nannying jobs in France. Once they arrived in Istanbul, they were sold on to pimps who beat, raped, and forced them into prostitution.
It was a depressing tale.
The next day, I was talking to some people at work about it when one guy piped up with a typically superior opinion: "Come on," he said, "these women must be pretty stupid not to realize that something fishy was going on when they were given free trips to Turkey."
This struck me as something pretty easy to say from his privileged and comfortable position working at a well-paid job in Australia. Perhaps those women were stupid, but I don't think they deserve to be beaten, raped, and forced into prostitution because of it. He had no real idea of what their problems were, what they felt, or what they believed - and yet he was quick to dismiss them as deserving everything they got.
Never be too fast to judge the actions of another, particularly if they appear to be the victim of a particular situation. Until you are put into a similar set of circumstances, you are in a poor position to evaluate exactly what it is they're going through.
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