Is it merely a side effect of all our parents raising us to think that we need to be self-sufficient at all costs? I don’t think so. If that were the case, we wouldn’t need to have the welfare programs that we have in this country, and I don’t mean just the ones that help the poor. (Yes, people, unemployment benefits are welfare.)

Is it that people are afraid of what the person they’re in debt to expects in return? It’s a possibility, but I think in response, why should they be? So many offers of charity are made with absolutely nothing expected in return, especially if the parties involved are friends. And if the person lending a helping hand really expects something in return, what does the debtor expect to have to do? Dress in drag and do the hula? Perform acts appallingly revolting and degrading even to the most degenerate mind? Insane thinking.

People should not be afraid to take a helping hand being offered, unless it’s holding a stack of papers with a ridiculous amount of fine print. Refusing such can often result in you missing out on an opportunity to experience something that will benefit you in a positive way (and you’ll regret it later); or worse, have disastrous consequences on your very livelihood. Much like the President being able to admit when he’s wrong, taking help is a sign of strength, not of weakness. Goddess knows that I wouldn’t have made it through college going it alone; I needed those extra sets of notes, those e-mail conversations with my professors in order to make sense of it all.

Now, if only all that education and charity received could have yielded an actual word for what I’m talking about…

Here’s an example of what I mean: As I write this, we’ve still got the better part of a week before the summer officially ends. There still isn’t a lick of falling leaves on the ground outside my house. In fact, most days it’s still warm enough for me to go out in a t-shirt, shorts and sandals (assuming, of course, that work allowed me to wear the latter two garments). But then I got home from work tonight to find that my parents already had the Halloween decorations up: large plastic jack-o-lantern in the window, fall-themed wreath hanging on the door (which, as usual, Mom hung too high so that it’s blocking the view through the peephole) and a family of cutesy-looking scarecrows to decorate the bench on the porch.

As much as it may seem like I am, I’m not opposed to any of these decorations on their own. But why on earth do people want to rush the passage of time so badly by putting them up nearly a month before everyone else? It just seems like people don’t dwell on the here and now (or even on the recent past) anymore, like there’s some stench of death hanging out around it. For Christ’s sake, December 26th rolled around last year and there were already used trees on the curb ready to be taken away! It’s depressing, and it’s embarrassing to us as an entire species.

Then again, though, this is probably what Doc Brown’s mindset was like when he came up with the flux capacitor…