Hello folks, today I'm going to go off on one of my "Hot Buttons" , which is about that exact subject itself. We all have these little things, hearing or reading a specific issue will set us off like a rocket to the moon, or pick the planet of your choice, and we have little control over it. Wait, that's not quite true, we have the ultimate control over it, but for whatever reason some people choose not to practice that control.
All of this article is personal opinion and observation, from which I draw my own conclusions which may or may not agree with your own. What I see as being the one main problem with allowing ourselves to react to our hot buttons in the manner I have been seeing more and more frequently on the internet in both chatrooms and on newsgroups is that we are conditioning ourselves to react faster to situations that upset us. Does anyone else see this as being a potential problem?
As we learn new things we generally tend to repeat that behaviour over and over again and in so doing become quicker and more efficient at that task. Now think about how the same conditioning of reacting in a strong, or in some cases near violent, manner to someone pushing one of our hot buttons. Are we not training tolerance out of our basic set of manners? What is going to happen when someone pushes one of our hot buttons on the freeway? Is the conditioning of a quick and strong response paritally to blame for the increase in cases of road rage? Perhaps that is a silly correlation, but then again, perhaps it isn't.
The whole point is that we seem to be conditioning tolerance for others out of ourselves, and that I find to be disturbing. Take a few extra minutes, read and reread whatever it was you found to be offensive. If there's no doubt that this person deserves a scathing reply then by all means let them know the error of their ways. Thanks for stopping by and I hope your day is at least as enjoyable as mine. |