It doesn’t address the problem byrnema brought up. Her problem was not posed as “children are being abused! How do I stop it?” (To which “consider stopping child abuse!” would also have been unhelpful… in fact, I can’t think of anything she could have said where “learn about child abuse, and resolve to stop it” would have been remotely valuable advice… but at least it wouldn’t have been irrelevant.) Her problem is that she sees information about child abuse when she doesn’t want to. (Specifically, she sees media headlines—about child abuse that has already happened.) And it ruins her day.
In fact, it is actively counterproductive to the problem she brought up. “Learn about child abuse” would presumably just ruin more of her days. Committing to it as a long term project might just up and ruin her life, which is probably composed mostly of days. It’s simply not unreasonable to want to be able to manage information without becoming intractably distraught over it. If she could learn about child abuse without such a dreadful reaction to it, she might even be more effective at the substitute goal you proposed for her (stopping abuse from happening).
You labeled options other than your own with the value-laden terms “fatalism” and “escapism”. That’s not the actual menu. There are lots of ways to feel about child abuse, lots of ways to control information flow about child abuse into one’s life, and lots of ways to act on the world regarding child abuse. These things are independent. Byrnema sought help with the first, and you as good as told her she was wrong to want that help, that she should just feel terrible or otherwise she’d be remiss in her duties to abused children who can apparently somehow benefit from her pain (?).
I’m probably more agitated about this topic than I should be. I just hate it when people go around asserting that it is only right and proper to feel miserable over huge, intractable problems, and I hate it when people answer requests for help with “you are wrong to have that problem”, and I hate the “at least I tried!” philosophy of problem-solving because that doesn’t make everybody feel better, and… gosh, you pushed a lot of my buttons today. I hope that in spite of my irkedness I have managed to explain to your satisfaction why I “hated your opinion so much”.
While I am irked by Rabid’s response as well, I feel it necessary to point out that if this community accomplishes it’s goals, as a very young member of our community he/she has quite a lot to gain out of this site.
I say, keep at it Rabid and do not get discouraged. My advice is to retreat and think about what is going on.
It is not such a terrible thing to realize that you may have been wrong.
I don’t think you should necessarily censor yourself. If it looks to you like your comment is useful, then post it...and if you get a negative response, then you learn something about yourself and others learn something about themselves.
It doesn’t address the problem byrnema brought up. Her problem was not posed as “children are being abused! How do I stop it?” (To which “consider stopping child abuse!” would also have been unhelpful… in fact, I can’t think of anything she could have said where “learn about child abuse, and resolve to stop it” would have been remotely valuable advice… but at least it wouldn’t have been irrelevant.) Her problem is that she sees information about child abuse when she doesn’t want to. (Specifically, she sees media headlines—about child abuse that has already happened.) And it ruins her day.
In fact, it is actively counterproductive to the problem she brought up. “Learn about child abuse” would presumably just ruin more of her days. Committing to it as a long term project might just up and ruin her life, which is probably composed mostly of days. It’s simply not unreasonable to want to be able to manage information without becoming intractably distraught over it. If she could learn about child abuse without such a dreadful reaction to it, she might even be more effective at the substitute goal you proposed for her (stopping abuse from happening).
You labeled options other than your own with the value-laden terms “fatalism” and “escapism”. That’s not the actual menu. There are lots of ways to feel about child abuse, lots of ways to control information flow about child abuse into one’s life, and lots of ways to act on the world regarding child abuse. These things are independent. Byrnema sought help with the first, and you as good as told her she was wrong to want that help, that she should just feel terrible or otherwise she’d be remiss in her duties to abused children who can apparently somehow benefit from her pain (?).
I’m probably more agitated about this topic than I should be. I just hate it when people go around asserting that it is only right and proper to feel miserable over huge, intractable problems, and I hate it when people answer requests for help with “you are wrong to have that problem”, and I hate the “at least I tried!” philosophy of problem-solving because that doesn’t make everybody feel better, and… gosh, you pushed a lot of my buttons today. I hope that in spite of my irkedness I have managed to explain to your satisfaction why I “hated your opinion so much”.
While I am irked by Rabid’s response as well, I feel it necessary to point out that if this community accomplishes it’s goals, as a very young member of our community he/she has quite a lot to gain out of this site.
I say, keep at it Rabid and do not get discouraged. My advice is to retreat and think about what is going on.
It is not such a terrible thing to realize that you may have been wrong.
I will try not to make this particular mistake in the future, but I still seem to be horrible at choosing when to just say nothing...
I don’t think you should necessarily censor yourself. If it looks to you like your comment is useful, then post it...and if you get a negative response, then you learn something about yourself and others learn something about themselves.