The topic of shame has always fascinated me. So when @Tex929rr suggested that some of the problems in this country were due to a loss of shame by our people, he piqued my curiosity, and I thought the topic of shame might be worth exploring. It’s no surprise that it’s a complicated subject, and many people are ambivalent about using it against others. But I thought I’d give it a try.
For certain, no one likes to feel shame. It is embarrassing, even traumatic at times, because shame makes us feel less than whole. Benjamin Rush, a Founding Father wrote that Shaming “is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death.” Especially the way shaming was carried out in colonial America:
Any conservatives worth their salt know about the despicable behavior of Joe Biden over the last 50 years: he has lied, touched women inappropriately, misused the power of his office, railroaded Justice Clarence Thomas in his Congressional hearings, and attacked voters. Under the spotlight of the 2020 campaign, his flaws are even more obvious, particularly his verbal gaffes, confusion and other attributes of potential dementia, as described in Brian Watt’s
My grandma was a fat woman trapped in a thin woman’s body. Or rather, she was a woman for whom thinness required more mortification of the flesh than is usual, eating like an anorexic (they do eat — sometimes) simply to get her BMI down to normal. At times, this meant weeks of her eating nothing but carrot broth. More generally, it meant cooking deliberately unpalatable food (justifying it as “healthier”) for her whole family, to discourage “overeating”. She was also a hypothyroidic woman who came of age in an era when thyroid supplementation was not widely known.
