Posted by hyperfocus on December 15, 2010, at 12:36:15
In reply to Re: So many?, posted by sigismund on December 12, 2010, at 12:25:42
One of the things that happens to kids in their teens is that they start realizing that their parents aren't omniscient all-knowing benevolent beings, and that they're actually pretty screwed up people. All of a sudden the source for all laws and justice and morality becomes exposed as a sham and teenagers hate and are filled with disgust at the hypocrisy of it. I was reading (possibly here) about one girl who had a military father who made strict rules about what was not acceptable at the dinner table. Burping meant banishment and no dinner. I guess up to a certain age she stuck to this morality and truly believed that she was a bad person for making noises at the dinner table. But eventually as she hit adolescence all the civility theater her dad put on became exposed. So the conversation would be like "Oh yeah well you know what's unacceptable? Bombing innocent babies..." Or something to that effect. "You don't want me to talk to boys, so what are you doing with all those pictures on your computer?" Etc. This story gets repeated billions of times all over the world. And naturally this leads to a lot of fracturing and estrangement that can take many years to resolve.
Maybe PB is passing though adolescence and people are realizing that Dr. Bob is just as screwed up as everybody else, and eventually they will stop hating him for it. A lot of Babble warfare is about Bob being misguided and pedantic and hypocritical and prejudicial, which is sort of a moot point since that's how everybody is. But what this girl I mentioned realized after she got much older is that her Dad's methods may have been misguided, but his intentions were benevolent. She learned to accept the unfair stuff that her Dad inflicted on her just as her Dad's clumsy efforts to make sure his kids knew the importance of doing the right thing, even in the smallest of circumstances.
So I mean maybe all the people who left will eventually accept Bob as the miserable specimen he is and learn to live with him and his actions. I absolutely hated my mother for literally 20 years for the things she put me through, but part of my growing up is learning to accept her as the flawed person she is and move forward with the knowledge that her basic intentions towards me were good. Perhaps the same thing will happen to Babble?
poster:hyperfocus
thread:973180
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20101201/msgs/973634.html