Saturday, June 9, 2007

maturity

I've recently been obsessing over a single sentence VA wrote : Children are the only people on this planet who can seriously claim 100% victim status.

It's got me thinking, is claiming to be a victim a kind of immaturity? I mean, shit happens to everyone. I doubt that there's a single person that has had a life free from emotional pain, but you don't learn from the experience by wallowing in it. I think part of maturity is being able to handle and control your emotions. The question is, then, when are you going to stop letting the past control you?

Let's apply this at a large scale. I imagine that many of the problems in Palestine arise from a communal victim status. (Caution: broad and sweeping generalizations ahead) Jews feel victimized because of the Holocaust, and Palestinians feel victimized because their fathers' land was taken from them.

Firstly, I'm not saying we should forget the Holocaust or The UN Partition Plan.

I'm saying that no one's life should be controlled by what's happened in the past.

I wonder, and suspect that I'm right, that blowing up yourself is an incredibly immature way of proving your point. The abbreviated scenario goes like this: "You're not listening to me! I'm not getting my way! WAHH I'm going to blow myself up and take take some of you along with me! BOOM!" Again, I know I'm massively generalizing, and I know that generally isn't not [i]that[/i] impulsive, but sheesh, that's what it amounts to. Riots are also generally massive orgies of immaturity. You know, I really wonder when the Middle East is going to grow up...

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