CAUTION! I'M TOO YOUNG TO HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT WHAT I'M POSTING! APPROACH WITH CAUTION, AND I WOULD APPRECIATE ANY WORDS OF CONDESCENSION AND/OR INTIMIDATION THAT CAN HELP ME FIND MY PLACE IN THE HIERARCHY OF LIFE AGAIN!
People seem to be very fixated on who has the right to have certain views. Because in this day and age, it's so true; if you haven't experienced something firsthand, your views can not qualify.
Bull.
Funny...I've always felt like my personal involvement in a situation has only clouded my impartial judgment as a whole. This is why girls who've been mistreated might tell a friend to stay away from all boys, though that friend may be missing out on a very generous and loving man who would have been a better spouse to them than anyone else. Or why a consumer who had a bad experience with a product will tell their friends to stay clear of that company, though they may have just had a defected product because it was dropped once during production.
Here are some examples I've witnessed or been the target of.
You've never been a woman, so your views on abortion don't matter. How dare you meddle in things you'll never have to live with?
You've never had to support a family so your desire to do something unconventional that you enjoy as a career is a result of never having responsibilities.
You're not old enough to have gone to a concert of the band you're listening to, so you don't even know the music. You're not fooling me, trying to look all vintage.
You've never had to be a parent, so your views on parenting don't matter. Who gives you the right to say you wouldn't do it my way?
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And here are some examples that should be applied if everything were that way.
You've never been in Casey Anthony's shoes, so your opinion on her guilt doesn't matter.
You've never been in an elected office, so you can't vote intelligently.
You've never met a terrorist, so your opinion that they are dangerous is judgmental.
You've never been poor, so it is wrong of you to think that someone stealing to feed their children should be treated like regular thiefs.
In fact, this sentiment..."You don't have the right because you've never been ________" goes against everything I and my blog stands for. Because if we can't have views on parenting before we're parents, does that mean we should stay in the dark, only cracking the door open and seeing the light when a kid falls into our laps? How will we have any time to consider what kind of parent we want to be? Won't we just have to parent by instinct through the way we were raised? Parenting may very well be the most important subject on Earth, and you mean to tell me that we can only study as we're sitting down to take all of the tests, with no breaks in between?
Apply this to the idea that we can't vote intelligently since we've never been in office. Goodbye democracy that means anything.
Hell, apply the idea of "You don't qualify to have statements on this" to any subject, and we are destined to be walking through life with our hands in our mouths. This will accomplish two things - you won't be able to speak very well, and your hands will have that weird spit smell, therefore no one will ever shake your hand. You see, preparation for supporting a family starts long before you're married and a parent. And parenting is well-suited to be thought out well before the child is born. Abortion is an issue that effects human life, and so everyone is concerned.
The only credence I will give to the absurd idea of qualifying to talk about things is this: It can be hard to understand factors, other than how we want to do things, that come up in a situation if we've never been there. But does my inability to grasp the fear that a woman who wants an abortion is feeling make me unqualified? If it did make me unqualified, then the real gist of abortion is all about the mothers and their emotions, right? It has nothing to do with my views on stopping a human life from coming into fruition, because if it did, then I would be entitled to have a view, as a human being talking about humans.
I have news for everyone reading this. You are confined to think about only that which you have experienced. Snuff out your imagination, cut down your sense of preparing ahead of time, slaughter your concern for world affairs, forget that anything happens except what has fallen into your immediate surroundings. Don't learn from your elders, because that is pretentious. Don't you dare see someone else do something you disagree with, and make a note to try to do things differently. Don't care about history repeating itself, because history is just a list of committees, battles, and dead guys.
I compel you: resist the urge to think about how to handle parenting issues, fight the feeling to weigh job offers ahead of time, flee the scenarios in which you might say "I should remember to NOT act that way."
No. I can not stress it enough. When you're told that you are too young, too inexperienced, too old, too poor, too rich, too white, too black, too skinny, too fat to speak or think about something, it usually says more about the person who is telling you than it does about you. Those who came, saw, and crumbled write off our disagreements as ignorance or arrogance because we've never been there. I disagree, because to assume this means that we must feel what someone feels, with our hearts, before we can think about it with our brains. The brain and the heart rarely play ball together...more frequently they operate like North and South Korea.And this would put us all knee-deep in a thick and smelly situation.
And a small note about my blog and brain in general: When I blog about something or say something, I have more thoughts about it than that event which brought it into my head. This post is not the disgruntled stab at someone who told me to shut my mouth one time. My blogs are composites about things I've been juggling over spans of time, not always very long spans of time, but certainly longer than the immediate situation that you think I'm griping about or reacting to the emotions supplied by it. And even if I was just griping, I'm well within my capabilities and rights to do so.
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