On Suffering and Being Kind
I thought about writing this piece for quite a while today, before getting started. I don’t want to make it into a rant, but I do want to state my opinion and the reasons that I look at this quote the way that I do. I have nothing against Emma Thompson; I’ve a positive, semi-likable image of her in my mind, but her quote that I’m writing about is, in my opinion, pompous.
The quote in question; “Its unfortunate and I really wish I wouldn't have to say this, but I really like human beings who have suffered. They're kinder.”
Emma, if I may be so informal, has an IQ of 138. She’s pretty damned smart. Having knowledge of her IQ, however, is really immaterial to the quote itself, unless one reads the quote, grimaces and then thinks, “That’s a pretty bad thing to say, as she’s really smart, and it suggests she really means it.”
“Its unfortunate and I really wish I wouldn't have to say this, but I really like human beings who have suffered. They're kinder."
The thing that jumps right out at me, is that, in my opinion, she’s saying that people who have suffered, are the type of “regular” people she’s okay being around. Her favorite kind of regular people, although it bugs her to have to say it.” Well, she has a great reason for her display of hospitality; “They’re kinder.”
We could expand on this logic, if we wanted to create the perfect world for Emma, and again, I mean no real offense here, but imagine if we thought that the most important thing in the world for all of us, combined, to do, was to please Emma; it seems we could do it by eliminating people who haven't suffered.
What about people who’ve only suffered a little bit? You see, this is where we’d run into trouble, as the only way forward that I can see, is we’d have to classify people by the levels of suffering they have endured. Obviously then, the really perfect human for Emma would be those who’ve suffered the most.
This is pretty unfair when you think about it, because we’ll potentially have far fewer people who have experienced the highest levels of suffering. It’d be like an “elite” class of sufferers. Pretty tough to make it into that group, too. They would be the absolute kindest, though, according to her logic.
Maybe she could accommodate the lower-level sufferers on a tier-like basis, possibly starting with an eight by ten, signed photo of Emma, for the sufferers who’ve endured the second highest level of suffering.
It would also be logical to think that those sufferers with the “lowest” levels of suffering, could possibly be completely overlooked for any acknowledgment (or love) whatsoever.
This kind of quote is also a bit troubling when attempting to criticize it, because someone will likely say that I’ve taken it out of context. I couldn’t really find any context for the quote, but even if it was meant to be a sarcastic statement, for example, no one would know, because all that’s out there, easily accessible, is the quote, standing on its own.
For this reason, celebrities, especially the truly intelligent ones, (of which there are few, actually), should be careful of the things they say, that can be quoted, because once the quote is out there, it’s pretty tough to find out what they really meant.
On Suffering and Being Kind © free-reign 2020
I've written this opinionated piece as I was inspired by a quote I received as one of the writing prompts in a daily email from 
Thanks for reading!
Sources for images used in this post:
(Public Domain photos are from Wikimedia Commons)
Suffering Man: IImage by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
EmmaThompson: Image by Bhash90 / CC BY-SA
