Thanks, W549. This has been an interesting thread, I think, because it's given a lot of us a change of perspective.
But you know, you shouldn't apologize for anything. Way back (last weekend was it?), you wrote *two* posts. In the first one, you were reacting very strongly to something that had bothered you, and you expressed some sentiments that *everybody* can understand -- after all, most adults don't like it much when other people tell them what they can and can't do. Then later you came back and wrote another post where you said you had thought about the situation some more, and had decided that what worked for you where you live might not really apply to other people who lived in different kinds of communities. So you're the one who got me thinking about this whole thing, because I thought what you said there was really wise.
In my post, in a way I was just elaborating on what you had already said in your second post, because you were the one who made the light bulb go on for me. We all live in a society with other people, and just to survive and have some peace, most of us abide by certain rules and count on our neighbors to do the same. If our society hadn't created property laws, for instance, we'd all either be wandering from place to place or spending every day defending our turf. So our society gives us rights, and we even have armies and police to protect them, but the more people we have around us, the more rules we end up adding to the list. I think the golden rule is a good principle no matter where we are -- don't do to somebody else what you wouldn't want them to do to you -- but if you're in a place where you're not constantly bumping into other people, that rule doesn't take such a big bite out of your personal freedoms. Which definitely sounds better to me than living in a crowded city, which is where I am now. Often, though, we end up where we end up not because we chose to be there, but because that's where our family is, or our job, or our kids' schools, or whatever.
Anyway, thanks again for letting me see the world through your eyes a little bit, and thanks for that great insight you had about how our environments shape our lives. I think this thread has helped us all understand one another (and our annoying neighbors) a little better and made us realize that what seems "right" to one of us might not always work for somebody else.
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