That's Sick

The thought was expressed this morning.

There is a certain fact or an evidence for something- anything, and sometimes it's forgotten or explained away, but sometimes it becomes the basis for a whole new understanding.  And once some idea is accepted, entire philosophies are spun around it.  And most people growing up in that system of though just believe it.  But isn't there evidence for anything at all?

There was a time when people did not believe in a microscopic world of bacteria, viruses or atoms.  And now, everybody who reads just accepts these things.  But what has changed?  We can't see these little critters and for the most part we don't live differently even though we all would acknowledge, if we were asked, that they are there.  We can't see the tiny bits of "table" that are spinning around each other.  We just see table.  And we just sit at it.  On our chair.

Yesterday at work, a child was coughing and then a man joined in.  It was a quiet place and I could feel the child's psychological need to fill the silence with her rather loud cough.  If someone had asked her if she was just coughing on purpose. I'm sure she would have denied it.  But that's mostly because she would want to defend her position, and instinctively believes in the right to defend any position, up to a certain point.  But would there have not been a time when a child would have been expected to be silent?  And she herself would have chosen to hold that cough in or leave the room or even ask for permission to let it out?  But she is a child of today and she knows without thinking about it that she has the right to let it out, and the fact that she doesn't know that filling the silence; being heard and expressing herself is part of the reason why she kept it up is part of her childhood.  Someday she will think about this; but not today in her childhood.

There was probably a time when a child would cough and all the adults around them would look on disapprovingly.  Maybe self-control was more valued.  I can picture this world because I have seen similar things in more quiet places- like a concert or a solemn ceremony.  But would this not have been the expectation in other times- that a child should not make any noise when out and about, rather than in a nursery or maybe at home, or maybe outside.

The man didn't want to cough.  He liked the silence and had chosen to be there.  He was there with his laptop to get some work done and he didn't want to be distracted by coughing, but more importantly to him; he didn't want to call attention to himself, and more importantly than that, he didn't want to distract other people who were also there for the same thing that he wanted; which was silence.  And behind that thought was his reluctance to give in to the cough so that he would then think that he was sick.  He would rather not cough than to stay in bed for two days, admitting he was sick.

I don't know how people thought about illness, really, before the acceptance of germs.  Surely illnesses passed from one to another and people must have thought that the illness transferred in some way and was some actual invisible thing.  Maybe they didn't think of it as a combination of lots and lots of tiny invisible things, but they knew they couldn't see it.  People thought demons could transfer from person to person.

Should there be the acceptance of the rule that no one should cough in public?  I often thought at a workplace that if only the sick people would stay home, more work would be done and less people would get sick.  But now I see the years I spent in negative thinking sickness as more destructive to me and the people around me than any two day cold.  How many two day colds did I have in the years I spent coughing incessantly only on the inside, doing work I didn't want to do?  There is something truly terrible about doing what you don't want to do but it is not as bad as not wanting to do what you're doing.

The man doesn't know when to cough.  It's his choice, right?  But he's erring on the side- or deciding on the side, of "less coughs are better."  The girl doesn't know when to cough either.  She's getting attention and he's getting attention.  She kind of likes it and he doesn't like it at all.  She's not thinking about illness. but if she did, she might consider a two day rest from school as a windfall.  She is only in the library to study with a tutor, and she doesn't want to be there.  He is thinking about missing productive time at his laptop and not wanting to give in to the germs.

I don't know what either of them think about the other.  But I am fascinated thinking how either of these people might be acting differently now that the world accepts germ theory as opposed to how they would act if they didn't think that way.

I believe that people today would say "Cough whenever you need to.  Just don't cough near someone else."  Is that at all different than what people would have done before the world thought that spittle might or might not contain little particles of self-reproducing cough-making tiny monsters?

If someone decided somewhere that everyone in each country around the world should cough once on the hour throughout the workday, this would strike me as ludicrous.  But if someone said it enough, with enough reason, it could certainly become an accepted norm.  Look at all the things that have become accepted.  The term workday didn't mean what it does now, only 150 years ago.  And there are people who can read this, who probably never would, that wouldn't know that the term means one of five days in a row.  We hear things and we accept them or reject them.  So many things are unintentional and it's nice to get a handle on some of them.

I think I could start a movement within self-help and health; which both seem to be very profitable subjects, that one needs to cough a certain amount of times to get over a certain sickness.  I can sell manuals that list tables of illnesses and numbers.  That's what I did as an insurance adjuster, so maybe it could work here.

Slight runny nose, no other symptoms- cough four times quickly every half hour from 4:00 PM to 7:15

Then I could make more and more complicated charts and set up apps and computer programs to read them for people.

Then when others disagreed with me, I could argue my position based on further research and since more and more experts are getting into the argument, less and less people would question the underlying premise of the new cough industry.