Jewish Young Professional "JYP"

Rightness

Photo by Edmond Dantès from Pexels

We shout our rightness. No one cares.

Everyone is shouting.

Stands are platforms to shout from.

We taught children to take stands

Like taking vitamins –

Like it’s good and necessary.

We should have taught them

to listen and understand.

Also, vitamins cause liver damage1.

***

For dVerse

***

1I hugely oversimplified for the sake of a 44 word poem.  Read the study in full and talk to your doctor.  Do not take medical advice from a random poet-blogger.

60 comments

  4. Oh yes. Wonderfully penned. There is way too much shouting in this world about things that don’t really matter, while ignoring so many urgent needs. Could it be that all the vitamin damaged livers are twisting people’s brains? One of our clients was at the office yesterday and he was talking about all the crazies that come out to school board meetings and yell about this, and that, and everything. He said the administrations brings a young kid to represent the interests of the school board and they slap do the crazies for yelling at their child. The worlds has become way too bizarre.

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  10. Thank you. I feel like I’ve been shouting into a void lately. Mostly because talking to actual people is too frustrating. So I listen and then don’t respond because it all feels so futile. I can hear the logical fallacies, but if no one is listening, what’s the point in talking? So I retreat. And then shout fruitlessly at a blank screen. But what’s the point in shouting?

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  11. That’s a darned fine poem, and the surprise ending blew my mind! Is that true about vitamins? Yikes! 😀 Too much truth, because we all need to listen and not keep trying to be heard as much. Love your poems!!

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    • I found a paper (looks like the one I linked to originally is more of a summary of a symposium – here’s a better one https://aasldpubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hep.27317) by authors who found a link between herbal dietary supplements and liver injury. One would have to do further research to determine if there are other papers supporting or refuting that conclusion, which herbal or dietary supplements were implicated (vitamins being a subset of the supplements on the market), how strong is the link relative to other factors, etc. Long story short, I don’t know, but it’s a good question.

      Yep, it’s so hard to listen, but also so necessary.

      Thanks!

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  12. Jewish Young Professional, thanks for showing a new perspective on it. You’re right we are taught to fight for whatever we want but maybe it’s time for another way? Wow on the vitamins. Sometimes I think Western medicine thinks of ever more clever ways to shorten our lives. What could be more clever than to convince people that dangerous things are good for them. Fluoride in water is one that comes to mind for me.

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    • Exactly. Maybe more listening and civil conversation and then there wouldn’t be as much need for fighting. But that is difficult when you don’t have a partner with whom you can have a civil conversation.

      I definitely think that certain things get accepted as true when that might not really be the case (eg. so-called healthy diets, eco-friendly actions that upon full lifecycle analysis aren’t that environmentally friendly. etc.) I do want to caveat that I’m not a medical expert, and I found one study headline https://aasldpubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hep.27317) by authors who found a link between herbal dietary supplements and liver injury. One would have to do further research to determine if there are other papers supporting or refuting that conclusion, which herbal or dietary supplements were implicated (vitamins being a subset of the supplements on the market), how strong is the link relative to other factors, etc. I really don’t know if vitamins are or are not harmful generally or for an individual, hence the disclaimer. But it’s a belief that, like others we take for granted, is worth further exploration to see if the data backs it up.

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  16. I’ve been preoccupied with the idea of being right, lately. We constantly feel like we are right, even when our ideas are evolving/changing–a process that implies moving from wrong to right. But how does the scientist argue with a politician (pick any scientist and any politician from recent headlines) when scientific method can only show the latest iteration of an evolving subject, but politicians always speak with dead certainty? And yet, what good does it do when both sides of an argument are presented with dead certainty?
    Anyway, vitamins? Seriously. Great.

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    • The scientist and the politician have different goals. The scientist is trying to report findings as accurately as possible. The politician is, at best trying to create policy and/or allocate resources among competing priorities, and at worst, trying to get re-elected. Doubt isn’t useful for making decisions or getting votes.

      Re: vitamins, I found one paper and I haven’t explored in depth to know how well-designed the study is, how many other studies support or refute its findings, how strong the link is, if all supplements are linked to liver damage or if only certain ones are, etc. So I don’t really know. But I couldn’t write all that in a poem!

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    • That would be amazing, right?! The challenge is that a) science is hard to interpret correctly, especially conflicting results, studies that refute each other, changing variables, etc. b) many things really ought not be political, but once leaders have to create policy and allocate resources to competing priorities, everything becomes political. But it would be really nice if that were not the case.

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    • It’s one study the conclusion (and actually, I didn’t read it closely enough to know if that really was the conclusion – it’s really a paraphrase of the abstract) of which I oversimplified for poetic purposes. You’d want to read in full to determine the strength of the study and the link, which specific supplements were implicated, and whether other studies support or refute this. Your day might not be ruined!

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