Posted by Jenny on June 07, 2002 at 18:31
In Reply to: Wetters: Our place in society posted by Eratosthenes on June 07, 2002 at 09:27
quote:
You can actually see a parallel here between pants wetting and something like UFOs for example. Everybody is quick to laugh and scoff at someone who says they saw a UFO. Why? Fear.
Sorry to be picky, but I think it's more like you don't believe in UFOs. I assume you mean psychos in general? I walked down a hallway at my campus today and there was this guy, completely unknown to me, who said in passing to me that he was hearing voices inside his head. I just thought he was kidding, but thinking back.. well, what if he was? Then we had a mentally ill student walking among us, didn't we? Now, I don't think he would shoot up the school or something, but I just was generally scared at that thought (funny, if I knew someone was schizofrenic (sp.?) and kept seeing and talking/interacting with non-existing pepople, I wouldn't be scared as that had a name.. strange huh?
I think that's the problem here. If you may also allow me to provide another example, let me use homosexuals. Think about those people 30 years ago. That's about how we are, except almost nobody knows about us. Maybe we'll be accepted some day, but I bet it'll take at least 50-100 years for it to happen, due to a human's instinctive fear-reaction to the unknown (immigrants to a country with few minorities, lespians, homosexuals, AIDS-infected people, or people with some weird syndrome).
As long as we are only a place on the web... well, I think I'd prefer it that way. If you really want attention, have some festival or open, official activity focusing on wetting, just to get everyone's attention. People's first reaction would be "shouldn't someone shut that thing down", then the hygienic issues, then it'd be official (with x more stereotypes, large-scaled debates....)
I'd love to see some society like in Melanie and Kyrie's school, but I'm afraid it won't happen any time soon. Because truth to be told, even I, who does this, is slightly scared of such a society. The Etherington school in the fictional novel started to get unhealthy (contests), and unhygienic (all the urine adding up). Second, more people would suffer from bladder complications because of trying to hold it just to build up a desperation, and don't you think the whole environment would smell like hell and also attract spiders and other nasties? It'd take a good deal of people to keep all that clean, but it's possible!
See, the whole point is being normal. Let me use as an example a World History Class I was in a long time ago in the US, where I was studying at the time. The teacher, talking about the US freedom of speech, said it was more liberal in Northern Europe (especially Scandinavia) in that girls were allowed to sunbathe topless. This triggered a lot of laughing, joking, etc. Then I realised that, hey, to them it's normal. Same as the Japanese eating raw fish and that African tribe where the women deformed their lower lips by putting them into some round plate-like things. We just have to make ourselves "part of the bandwagon".