Perspective

Photo by Stephen Talas on Unsplash

I’ve written three or four different posts for today. I’ve scrapped them all. Why? Because I’m dealing with a herniated disc in my lower back and have been in a lot of pain all weekend.

Luckily, the doctor said it didn’t need emergency surgery, so that was nice, but I also noticed that he used the phrase “emergency surgery” as opposed to just surgery. That means going under the knife is still on the table.

And, with the pain I’ve been experiencing all weekend—this all started Saturday morning—I’ve been looking at a lot of stories and simply can’t find all that much to write about.

Why? Because my perspective has changed, even if for just a little while.

See, I’m trying to deal with something incredibly painful, which might require surgery, and if left untreated, could cause complications that are life-threatening. I’m going to have to pay for it out of pocket, in part because Obamacare made insurance stupid expensive for most people, and I’m seeing people argue online over whether or not people should be expected to live with at least a hint of frugality.

It’s stupid. It’s an inane argument to have, and I was knee deep in it until my back kicked me in the ass.

We argue over everything in this day and age, including people getting butthurt because an attractive actress was featured in a commercial for a denim company with a tagline that said she had great jeans.

For crying out loud, can we have a little perspective here?

Yeah, I know, my current situation is a me problem and not a problem for everyone else, and I’m not going to argue it’s not. It’s painful, but it has zero impact on anyone else other than me and mine.

My point, though, is that not everything is a sign that the house is on fire and we need to freak the hell out. There are real problems out there, and this fascination some have with the trivial isn’t because they’re fighting the real fight. It’s that their lives are so empty of any real challenges that they see problems where none exist.

It’s why we tell so many of these people to go out and touch grass. They have no perspective, and in a lot of cases, they have no perspective about the people they’re trying to advocate for, thus coming off as even whinier than usual.

I want to make the world a better place. I want to write things that help us move forward as a society and make a world we’re all better off in. Right now, though, I just want to make my own corner of the world a little more pain-free. That’s my here and now, and it sucks, but not as bad as having some twit tell me that my belief that a billionaire isn’t inherently wrong because he said something about the less well off makes me some kind of bootlicker.

Why? Because I know what it’s like to suffer financially. I have good months and bad months, but I’m going to have a bad month or two in my immediate future, and I know it. It’s kind of hard for me to feel bad for the transgender person having their feelings hurt because the women don’t want the dude in their locker room, or for the person who was told they probably should make a sandwich for lunch instead of eating out every day.

I remember Keith Olbermann railing about the Citizens United case, calling it “our Dred Scott” with all the chipmunk sincerity he could muster, only for time to show that very little actually changed about our daily lives. It wasn’t the end of mankind by any stretch of the imagination, and that’s because Olbermann lives in a bubble of stupidity, as do a lot of other people on both sides of the political aisle.

It would do some of these people good to step outside of themselves for a little while and learn how the rest of America lives, how we function, what matters to us, and why deporting illegal aliens isn’t seen as a particularly bad thing.

When people claim to speak for regular Americans, they need to actually learn some perspective first.

Then they might understand why no one bought the BBC’s attempt to make “fathers” who sold their daughters into slavery as the victims. Those of us who have been destitute would never have even considered such a thing, if for no other reason than it’s downright evil.

They don’t know who we are. They don’t have any perspective on what suffering looks like for millions of Americans. They only know what the talking heads tell them to “think.”

Meanwhile, the rest of us just try to deal with our own ordeals and manage as best we can, and do so precisely because so much of what some people are losing their minds over doesn’t actually matter all that much.

The problem is that when it does matter, no one will take them seriously anymore.

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