Want your legs chopped off?
Discussion
hornet said:
My next thought was the thing that struck me, as rather than think "ooh, that man only has one leg, how sad for him", I instead thought "wow, that looks amazingly engineered". We can talk about technological progress, but I think there's been a huge attitude shift as well.
Personally, I think your thinking is along the right lines - if he's not hiding the leg he doesn't feel sorry for himself about it, so why should you? Having worked with "disabled" people, one thing I can tell you is that very few of them want (or need) pity from anyone. The more people think like you did at that juncture, the better this society will be.
slightly o/t but I read recently that once we fathom how to capture the human "soul" we can transplant it over to machines and thus live forever ie simply replace parts as they wear out. We can then travel the Universe too 
ThunderGod said:
Personally, I think your thinking is along the right lines - if he's not hiding the leg he doesn't feel sorry for himself about it, so why should you? Having worked with "disabled" people, one thing I can tell you is that very few of them want (or need) pity from anyone. The more people think like you did at that juncture, the better this society will be.
I certainly don't want to claim I'm better than the next person for thinking that way, it was as much about catching myself not thinking something, if you know what I mean? I was genuinely struck by the fact I wasn't struck by the fact he had an artificial leg, and it rather caught me off guard, albeit in a good way. Despite my cynicism towards the whole thing, I suspect the Olympics and Paralympics are at least party responsible.Gassing Station | Science! | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff