That’s why they’re afraid of it.
A fire extinguisher is made as a tool to be used by someone who can cope, to protect his property and protect those who cannot cope.
The university educated, the entertainers, and media personalities, leftists in general, tend to wear their inability to cope as a badge of honor.
We’ve all see it; the guy well into adulthood who cannot drive a car, for example, and is clearly proud of the fact. Driving is what servants do, for me– It is not something I do. He has his nose in the air when he informs you he doesn’t drive.
If you gave him the gift of jumper cables and a nice floor jack, he’d be offended and maybe even a little scared. If you required him to demonstrate a fire extinguisher on a network TV show? Same thing.
Only icky people can build things, fix things, cope with unexpected dangers, and use guns or fire extinguishers. Eeew!
The Special Little Snowflake, or as I call him, “Fragile Little Flower” gains his identity through his weaknesses. He has learned that his weakness is his power over other people.
Those of us who can cope are to blame for this situation, through our failure to correct and through our capitulation. The FLFs are in charge of much of society and culture as a result.
Someone recently brought up The Lord of the Flies to describe the world, and it fits quite nicely. When the adults fail in their responsibilities to encourage and guide the “children” into becoming capable and responsible adults themselves, then all hell will break loose. That describes world politics for the last 100 years quite well.
I’ve often thought that we have never advanced beyond the Athenian model, where the citizens thought and debated, and the slaves and menials did the dirty work of propping up civilization. At least that’s the patrician’s view.
There’s nothing wrong with specialization and division of labor of course, but it can get so out of hand that a person becomes a functional invalid. Then he’s controlled by his inadequacies and fears.
Being the president of a corporation or a high-paid TV show personality is fine and dandy, but one should none the less be able to put out a fire, change a tire, grow vegetables, gut a deer, set a broken bone, console a child, threaten a Congressman, fix house wiring or shovel manure when necessary.
Some people I know are so freaked out, going to DEFCON One at the sight of cat poop on the floor or a broken dish, they’d likely crawl into a corner, curl up into the fetal position and die of a heart attack at the first sign of a real problem. All they know how to do, really, is make noise until someone else takes care of them.
My point is that this is our fault. It’s MY fault. M’Kay? We too often think we’re doing some kind of good in helping someone who is actually fully capable of helping themselves. We want to be thought well of, after all. Well DO YOU SEE THE TRAP in that? This is how the weak enslave (so to speak) the strong. But that only shows that we’re not really strong, doesn’t it? Not STRONG IN THE RIGHT WAY.
“There’s nothing wrong with specialization and division of labor…”
No, but when the patrician class disdains the ones making civilization function, that’s not good. The division of labor isn’t the issue, it’s the attitudes about same.
Pingback: SayUncle » Why I worry about the future
Time at a university doesn’t preclude competence with a fire extinguisher.
My Ph.D. research required that I work in a lab with about 200 lb. of boiling hexane. Yeah, it got away from me twice and I emptied a total of three 20 lb dry chemical extinguishers on the fires.
Engineers are different, as I’ve been told a time or two.
Yes, if you work with the real world you need some functioning brain cells. The point you made also applies to people who work in real science (subjects like physics or chemistry — not psychology or sociology, which never were and never will be, or climatology, which perhaps once was and may be again, but isn’t today).
Although, as a geologist I’ve worked with colleagues who were primarily office types, who had no idea about the realities of field work, even after some exposure to it. Some folks are just genetically wired to reject information at a practical level.
Fragile Little Uptight Flower: FLUF
; )