“Its not funny until somebody gets hurt.”
I am assuming most of you have heard or read this phrase sometime in your lives. Most of you would even go as far as to agree with its message. In my opinion, it’s really not that funny when someone gets hurt and it is your moral obligation to help that person. Sure, a frail 108-year-old woman tripping over a pinecone is always a humorous spectacle, however, other people are looking and you are the closest one to help her back onto her wheelchair. In this situation, you have two choices 1) grasp her body firmly and lift her back unto her wheelchair or 2) laugh hysterically.
I am surprised there isn’t a social stigma against laughing at people that get hurt. If you laugh at a guy with Down syndrome eating an ice cream with his ear, you would be damned to hell! I am inferring that it isn’t socially acceptable to laugh at a retarded individual because they did not have the choice to be retarded. If somebody gets hurt because they try showing off with their skateboard, then it’s funny because he made the choice.
Do we really have a choice? Assuming there is no free will, our conscious minds are just a product of external forces. Can we really laugh at the kid who decided to show off with their skateboard? To put things in better perspective, would that kid still have shown off to you if he didn’t have the knowledge that skateboarding was cool? We shouldn’t blame this kid for choosing to show off because it’s not his choice to do so.
In the end of the first paragraph of this post I presented you with two choices and a situation. I can almost guarantee that 95% of you would choose the first option (or neither) in reality. There is too much social brainwashing for you to consciously choose the second choice. Well, I can’t blame you for choosing the first option, just like I can’t blame the skateboarder for showing off.
If we laugh at people getting hurt, shouldn’t we also be allowed to laugh at retarded people?
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