The Golden Rule Should be Silver

This day in diary history:

7/28/08

"I'm not much of a diary keeper... I typically can't keep one going for more than a few days. However, I do from time to time have sudden revelations, and those I've had in the last few days seemed particularly significant, so I felt the need to write them down.

"'How cruel is the golden rule?' is the first line of a song by the popular band Fall Out Boy, but you might find my context to be slightly different." [The song is called Golden. Go figure.]

"I can't relate to the golden rule. It works in most cases, so it's fine to teach preschoolers because if they happen upon an instance where it wouldn't work, it's easily forgotten because four-year-olds get mad at people for harsh rules too much to hold a grudge about a little correction for very long. But for those of us who have mastered the golden rule, it's best to change it on occasion to 'treat others the way they want to be treated.' Even then, it's best to use your own judgement in a given situation to word your responses in a way that wouldn't offend that particular person. It can be very complicated.

"When I was younger, a common smart-alack comment I would make was that I wouldn't mind if someone said that to me. Teachers didn't understand that I was being completely honest and were lost as to how to explain to me how to treat people. [Wow! That's a sentence... Oh, me.] In most cases, I know anyway and learned to do so as I matured.

"So I suppose the real problem is that people don't all think the same. I'm definitely an exception to the norm when it comes to thoughts and feelings. I'm reminded of a quote from the book Twilight. [Please forgive my young self.] Bella often answered simple questions with deep and sophisticated answers, as I often do in order to make the conversation more interesting -- which I suppose was Stephanie Meyer's literary motivation for doing so. (I really ought to write a book). [Agreed. Working on it.] In this case, Bella responded to Edward's complaints about darkness by saying, 'I like dark. Without the dark, we'd never see the stars.' [Okay. Still love that quote.] It's followed by a sarcastic comment to keep from getting too deep into that, [Like my blog posts!] but I still caught the deeper meaning.

"This is more personal, but I find my life to be too perfect. My problems are never big enough. Scary as it may sound to other people, I dream of catastrophic events and horribly sad events that would cause depression. When reading Twilight, I caught that line and realized it was exactly what I was feeling. I long for something horrible to happen so I can prove to myself how strong I am because of God. I know I could handle it, which is why my life is hard because it's so easy. Naturally, most people don't want their lives to be worse, proving that if I treat them the way I want to be treated, they won't enjoy it the way I would/wouldn't. It's very hard to explain, but the simple truth of the matter is, the golden rule should be silver because it doesn't always work."

 ~14-year-old me.