A matter of principle...
Sep. 4th, 2003 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dennyWas just talking to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
azekeil on ICQ and he reminded me of a rant I meant to post when I got out of hospital. The energy has gone out of it now, so it's not a rant, but I think it's still worth posting as a point for discussion:
While I was in hospital there was a fortnight where I didn't really eat much - I was on morphine, which does horrible things to your digestive system, the simplest of them being a loss of appetite. I lost enough weight (given that I started off skinny) that the hospital sent the dietician around to see me, and she recommended that I should be put on those protein supplement drinks. I agreed to this, until they turned up with one the next day and I noticed it was made by Nestle - who I'm boycotting. So I politely refused to drink it...
My dad was pretty narked about this when he turned up that evening - he was trying to tell me that "there comes a time when you can't let principles get in the way of what's good for you"
My answer would have been - if I wasn't too wankered on morphine to think straight at the time - "That's exactly when you find out if you've got principles... or just opinions". I couldn't believe he thought that I should stand down on something like that - regardless of what his opinion of the boycott itself was - just because it was now inconveniencing me.
azekeil on ICQ and he reminded me of a rant I meant to post when I got out of hospital. The energy has gone out of it now, so it's not a rant, but I think it's still worth posting as a point for discussion:While I was in hospital there was a fortnight where I didn't really eat much - I was on morphine, which does horrible things to your digestive system, the simplest of them being a loss of appetite. I lost enough weight (given that I started off skinny) that the hospital sent the dietician around to see me, and she recommended that I should be put on those protein supplement drinks. I agreed to this, until they turned up with one the next day and I noticed it was made by Nestle - who I'm boycotting. So I politely refused to drink it...
My dad was pretty narked about this when he turned up that evening - he was trying to tell me that "there comes a time when you can't let principles get in the way of what's good for you"
My answer would have been - if I wasn't too wankered on morphine to think straight at the time - "That's exactly when you find out if you've got principles... or just opinions". I couldn't believe he thought that I should stand down on something like that - regardless of what his opinion of the boycott itself was - just because it was now inconveniencing me.
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Date: 2003-09-04 04:32 pm (UTC)As Peta said, I suspect he saw it as more than an inconvenience. I see your health as more important than any principles(unless going against them would affect your mental health), and I don't think that that's deriding or ignoring things, just acknowledging that everything is relative.
Look at it this way - if it actually came down to a choice between Em consuming Nestle products, or putting herself in danger, would you even have to think about it? My guess is that your dad sees it like that sort of choice...