Tuesday 18 November 2008

Much Ado About Nothing: On Choices...Again

After a long lull, I decided to write someting after reading zewt's blog entry this morning. He talks on usage of children as shields from police action, criticism for that actions and that in looking at the big picture, many also invoke the names of their children to do just about nothing at all even in the sight of great injustice.

As I wrote down my comments to his entry, I realised that it is again about choices. For instance, when I read the online news for the past week or so, I noticed there are much of about the same thing being rehashed, recycled and reported. I noticed there are little for me to put my views on as it seemed redundant to repeat myself. Or in other instances, it is nauseating to even bother writing such as on oxymorons pertaining to some leaders blowing clarions on the need to fight/resist/or simply I-don't-use money politics.

And also due to my home internet connection running at snail pace of late. I can't even view my favourite animes on crunchyroll.com.

So anyway back to choices.

Source: http://fly4change.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/consumerism-whats-your-first-reaction/

In life we make many choices - some mundane, others important; some impromptu, others after much careful considerations. There are many trade-offs we can make that will seem better for the future after looking at the direct consequences of my actions. And popular ones too.

We can quote many reasons to support our actions like how the police have reasons to act by arresting peaceful demonstrators for fear of causing national insecurity. Fear afterall, is another prime motivator for doing just about nothing and everything possible to keep things per status quo.

But ultimately, from the choices we make, who is to judge if it is really good or bad? Afterall, everyone has their stories to tell. Not everyone place equal weightage of the same factors as us. Will we see them lesser or greater for the choices they make? So by what standards do we use to measure?

How nice is it that we can live in a carefree life where we don't have to make difficult choices. Just making simple choices like whether to have foie gras for appertiser or perhaps a simple mushroom soup with warm bread instead. We have no one to blame and everyone is our friend.

But knowing that few, if any, has such choices, I guess one other choice we have is what we make out of the consequences of choices others made. We can choose to be upset or worry or just wait and see. Like when I ordered that tong yuen in ginger soup dessert and wondered if I should do the same for my friends though they have asked for me to order for them. They weren't upset. They ended up ordering things the like instead.

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