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I used to have this problem where I'd refrain from judging people. It used to be that I might see a five year old peeing on sleeping people in the park and think "that kid isn't a brat, or even a menace, just a victim of poor parenting or an environment non-conducive to healthy child development." At a certain point I realized that there is, in fact, a happy medium between understanding the reasons for something and an appropriate attitude toward the thing itself.
Living in such a pluralist society as Toronto I grew up trying to not judge people. Fact: Most of the Chinese kids in primary school brought really awful smelling lunch to school. Did it mean I should dislike them? No. But, in my childhood mind, I confused not disliking them with not disliking the smell of their food. Later, and now numb to the smell of boiled chicken in waterlogged rice, and I encountered highschool cafeteria food. Kids would buy a plate of cardboard ("fries") and old puke ("cheese pizza") and sit next to me to eat. After a year or two of this routine I snapped. Specifically, I snapped when I watched somebody eat a blueberry muffin from the cafeteria that I could've sworn I'd seen there for weeks without anybody buying it. I launched into a brief self-rightious diatribe: "How can you eat that? That muffin has been there for fucking weeks! Weeks man! I mean that muffin is a fucking landmark in the caf, you don't eat a landmark! Good god it's... it's... disgusting!" Then it hit me: I could function like any ordinary person in society - judging and being judged - without ever having to hate anyone or anything in it. I could walk down a street and see a frankly ridiculous looking girl but judge only that; her genuine ridiculousnessissity (hell yeah I'm smooth - even Scribbld doesn't auto-detect that as an error). I don't need to find it unreasonable as well as repulsive because, indeed, most repulsive things are reasonable at some level. So if ever again I see a kid letting one go on a sleeping park-goer I can thnk to myself
"that boy is obviously just a victim of poor parenting or an environment non-conducive to healthy child development yet is, at the same time, a total douchebag."
Living in such a pluralist society as Toronto I grew up trying to not judge people. Fact: Most of the Chinese kids in primary school brought really awful smelling lunch to school. Did it mean I should dislike them? No. But, in my childhood mind, I confused not disliking them with not disliking the smell of their food. Later, and now numb to the smell of boiled chicken in waterlogged rice, and I encountered highschool cafeteria food. Kids would buy a plate of cardboard ("fries") and old puke ("cheese pizza") and sit next to me to eat. After a year or two of this routine I snapped. Specifically, I snapped when I watched somebody eat a blueberry muffin from the cafeteria that I could've sworn I'd seen there for weeks without anybody buying it. I launched into a brief self-rightious diatribe: "How can you eat that? That muffin has been there for fucking weeks! Weeks man! I mean that muffin is a fucking landmark in the caf, you don't eat a landmark! Good god it's... it's... disgusting!" Then it hit me: I could function like any ordinary person in society - judging and being judged - without ever having to hate anyone or anything in it. I could walk down a street and see a frankly ridiculous looking girl but judge only that; her genuine ridiculousnessissity (hell yeah I'm smooth - even Scribbld doesn't auto-detect that as an error). I don't need to find it unreasonable as well as repulsive because, indeed, most repulsive things are reasonable at some level. So if ever again I see a kid letting one go on a sleeping park-goer I can thnk to myself
"that boy is obviously just a victim of poor parenting or an environment non-conducive to healthy child development yet is, at the same time, a total douchebag."