Born in a bomb shelter
callumbirch.com
callumbirch.com
I think of them when it feels like times are tough. The pandemic. The cost of living crisis. Job loss.
It's tough.
But it's nothing.
Not really.
Not in comparison to the circumstances some people find themselves in.
Not in comparison to the circumstances other people make it through.
Imagine being born in a bomb shelter.
Imagine giving birth in a bomb shelter."
Or, more commonly, "You think you have it hard? I know a guy who went through XYZ."
Sometimes people need perspective when they feel times are tough, other times they just need sympathy.
Yeah that's bullshit. Some poor bastard has it worse than you. That doesn't mean your problems aren't real and you don't have to deal with them. It's good to try to keep perspective on your problems but that doesn't mean you need to just dismiss them.
However, for less extreme situations I find this can be helpful. From a recent personal experience I felt that acknowledging the potentiality of being far worse, and thinking about the situations of people who actually are, it helped putting things into perspective and helped me deal with a personal "difficulty".
* I can't find a better English word for the Afrikaans "moed" which refers to not only courage, but something a little bit bigger and more holistic than courage.
Your grandparents went through the Spanish Flu? Well, Dad, we had Covid.
Your parents went through the Great Depression? Yeah, well, we had 2008.
Your parents had World War II? You had to worry about being sent to Vietnam? Yeah, that's nice, I guess, but we had 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq.
And I'm not just mocking the youngsters. The things that happened to other people are less real to us than the things that happen to us.
The Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War II were objectively worse than Covid, 2008, and 9/11/Afghanistan/Iraq. Far worse, in every case. But most of us didn't live the worse things. At best, we've heard about them. The more generations removed from them we are, the less the stories seem real.
On a friendly advice, one day I did some dissos (K). I didn't expect it to do anything, but turned out that true detachment from my problems was quite the foreign feeling. Suddenly the true scale of my problems became apparent. Nobody else told me this, I myself came to conclusion about my problems that "it's kind of nothing". And it wasn't dismissive, it was actually a comforting thought because it made the problems less intimidating, something I could work on rather than feeling defeated about.
I didn't really get a dismissive tone from this article, but I think if I find the same conclusion to be helpful when it comes from within but dismissive when it comes from someone else, that's a little egotistic and counter productive.
> He had an incredibly tough start.
But at 6'4" he had a leg up.
Daily, we witness how this fragile ice could crack at any moment. The war in Ukraine saw potentially 75,000 lives lost in Mariupol alone. The Palestine-Israel conflict escalates with over 1,500 civilian fatalities. Turkey's earthquake claimed 50,000 lives, upending millions more.
Here I am in central Germany, grumbling about waiting an hour for a doctor when my son had a fever. I won't stop complaining—that's not the point.
The point is to recognize the fragility of our peace and figure out how to reinforce it. What are we doing to prevent these tragedies? And if they do happen, how do we lessen their blow?
Let's approach it like Silicon Valley would with a datacenter outage: You don't just thank your stars it didn't blow up. You dissect the issue and outline measures to prevent a recurrence.
3500 of them Palestinian children
If you want to perform a root cause analysis then make sure you have the correct data.
Don't think what you're doing isn't transparent to anyone who has spent even a modicum of time becoming informed on the topic.
Anyone who is interested in the truth and “has spent even a modicum of time” would condemn the killing of innocent children and demand an end to their continued killing and suffering.
All I ask is that people apply some scrutiny to the sources and don't trust that just because something went viral on Twitter with a caption saying it's from Gaza, that it is. There are incredible numbers of bad-faith grifters who thanks to Elon now have a monetary incentive to spread bullshit for "engagement" and a lot of if has gone viral with millions of views despite being verifiably false with a simple reverse image search.
WHO, UN and other entities furthest away from being "politically tinged" consider the numbers "credible", "accurate", "reliable". I guarantee you what you are doing is very clear also, parroting literal propaganda points. And it's awful to see discussions on specific numbers numbers when any single loss of life is tragic.
>New York-based Human Rights Watch also says the casualty figures have generally been reliable, and that it has not found big discrepancies in its verification of past strikes on Gaza.
>"Those numbers are in line with what one might expect, given what we're seeing on the ground through testimony, through satellite imagery and otherwise," he told Reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/despite-bidens-dou...
https://www.emro.who.int/images/stories/palestine/WHO_oPt_Si...
It is time to educate yourself if you find that lacking.
I would not want to be the one siding with a Genocide in 2023 for lack of education.
Stop starting a witch-hunt every time someone is wrong on the internet.