Yesterday I wrote a quick post about purity. Sorry, I wasn't able to round up my thoughts as I would have wanted to, since the new season of Spartacus was about to start, and sadly men in short underwear is always a priority. However, there was a thought there that has been nagging me for a while and it's the fact that purity is sought to make us all alike without having to deal with tolerance towards our natural differences. Purity as a banner to pursue the erradication of anyone with "mixture", anyone deviant in the slightest of the preordered patron of society, and often purity is paired with clealiness, as if both terms were the same. But stepping aside from that discussion, I'm clinging here to the idea of "alike so we don't have to exercise tolerance towards differences".
Through recent Childfree discussions and articles that have come to me through other means, once again it came to my attention how people in society find it acceptable to expect others to adjust to children, family and marriage related situations, while similar situations of a different kind are seen as outrageous. It seems it's perfectly acceptable that someone don't stay late at the office or gets permission to leave early or arrive late when they have children and use their children as excuse. They had to drive the kids to school, can't stay because they don't have a babysitter, or their children are waiting for them at home. It is not a valid excuse to get late to the office or leave sooner when you have an elderly relative you must take care of. Even less if you are taking care of a sick pet.
If you complain because your neighbour's children are loud all day long, every day of the week, then you are the annoying, child-hating horrible person who doesn't understand and should move if it bothers you so much. But you are right to complain if the noisy ones are your pets. A barking dog, a cat dancing on the roof. You can complain if the elderly person living in the neighbouring house can't hear the TV and puts it too loud, but you can't complain if the pre-teen children of the neighbour blast Lady Gaga on you all day long.
You can't complain if your friend's are getting married and popping children like bunnies, inviting you to every wedding, bachelor or bachelorette party, baby shower and birthday, making you spend loads of money, but you can complain if your unmarried, childfree friend invites you to a fundraising party for a good cause (breast cancer, fight against cancer, human rights, green peace, PETA, fundraising for animal shelters, etc.). What makes children more important than the elderly? Why are the children of those who have them more important than the pets of those who have them? Who says that you can't love your dog, your cat, your hamster, your bunny, your snake just like you would love a child? Who says that their lives and their happiness matters less than that of a person? Who says you can't care for your relatives? Who says you are not allowed to dedicate yourself to those of your friends and family that are not your children but need you nonetheless?
If you haven't had a pet you loved, really loved, not just fed and kicked out of the sofa, then you don't know what's like to rush it to the ved because someone poisoned it. You don't know how you suffer when they whine and won't stand up from their little beds and look at you with those big, honest, innocent eyes hoping you know something that makes them better. You don't know what's like to see them in pain, even the emotional pain your pet can go through when they lose their cubs and look desperately for them, cry for them day and night, or try desperately to bring them back to life when they find them dead.
If you haven't loved a friend or a relative so much, that you're heart shrunks each time you see them fighting pain or sadness, when you hold their hands and the soft, thin skin wrinkled up, and feel it's getting thin and you constantly think of ways to make them feel better, then you don't understand, can't undrestand what's like to worry for someone that will die before you do, and yet desperately want to make them live more, another day, and pray each night for God to choose to take them away only in the most painless and peaceful of ways.
Why it is imposed on us to accept those with children and take silently the abuse of both children and their parents, while pushing away those who have in their lives other also important beings? If I don't have children, never marry, but work hard for a cause that's close to my heart, lets say, an animal shelter, or a shelter for women victim of abuse, or a shelter for children, a home for the elderly who have been abandoned by their relatives, or a foundation dedicated to fight breast cancer, or AIDS, why is my dedication, why is that where I put my heart less important, less significant, less worthy, if it's not the one thing that's socially accepted?
It's just like that concept of purity and the underlying attempt to uniform us all: if it's not the same things others go for, then it's not worthy and it should be repressed. If it's not the same as the socially accepted, then it can be subjected to bullying, and you'll be the sole responsible, the guilty. We get horrified when women in the Middle East are condemned as guilty, jailed and even sentenced to a horrible death for having been raped, because they are the victims and yet treated as if they were the criminals. However, with this cases, aren't we doing the same? Aren't we being unfair?
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