meeting last night

So I got almost nothing "personal" done.

I also woke up in a flopsweat too early this morning (today was to be a day off from exercising) because I was thinking that NEXT week was Thanksgiving, and I was out of time to do some things at work. (It isn't. I had to look at the calendar to convince myself, though).

I'm in one of my periodic cycles of being frustrated at my fellow humans. It seems everyone is so angry about everything, except a lot of the things they are really angry about are "displacement behaviors." The current example is the Starbucks cup thing. Apparently, instead of doing cups with pine trees or snowflakes or other things that signify "Christmas" without actually being Christian symbology, they're doing plain red cups this year.

And people are incensed about that.

You know, I don't have a dog in this hunt: I don't drink coffee anyway (my heart and adrenals would probably explode given how I react to multiple cups of tea) and there isn't a Starbucks in my town. (There are, these days, it seems, increasingly few things in my town.....)

But, eh meh. If the Federal government were saying "No business may use anything that signifies any kind of religious holiday is being celebrated any time soon," then I'd be upset. If I were told - or my church were told - not to put up a creche or a tree on our own property, then I'd be upset. But I can't care about an aesthetic choice by a business I wouldn't patronize anyway.

But it occurred to me this morning: maybe this is sort of a displacement behavior. People feel incredibly helpless about the state of the world. I know ISIS/ISL/DAESH/whatever you call it has been in the news a bit less lately than they were, but my reaction to the horror over the red cups was along the lines of, "Okay, when every non-Muslim* in the Middle East is safe from the threat of being beheaded for being the "wrong" religion, then we can talk about what Starbucks is doing"

(*Or even the 'wrong kind' of Muslim; apparently some of the people getting killed are people who aren't the particular extremist sect of Islam.)

But yeah. I guess the thing is, there's literally nothing most people can do (save for praying) about the people over there, but, I guess, the reasoning goes, I can go into my Starbucks and harass some minimum-wage barista (who might even agree with me but can't say so because she really needs this job).

But, I don't know. It wouldn't make me feel any better about the state of the world. It wouldn't make me feel like I had any more control. It does seem like the world is spinning (has spun?) totally out of control and there's literally nothing I can do to fix things. And I don't have the time and energy to do things like go protest at a Starbucks.

I don't know. I'm too tired too much of the time to be angry over things like this.

But I do wonder, as I said, if it isn't, for some people, a way of feeling like they're getting a little bit of control over what is going on in the world. But I wish there weren't so much angry hyperbole.



Another thought, added later: If a person has such a calm and uneventful life that they have the energy to be outraged over Starbucks cups, I hope they are thanking whatever Higher Power they believe in right now for their life being that uncomplicated. I wish my life were even a little less complicated and worrisome than it is right now, and I have it better than MANY people.