Originally Posted by Excargodog

Which isn't the exception that proves the rule, merely a more vivid example. I recall back in my college days a paper some social anthropologist had written about "the decline of stoicism in American culture." It sounded kind of bogus to me but it was assigned reading so I read it. It was a review of all the daily journals that had been written by the Donner Party. Daily journals - apparently - were a big thing with the wagon train crowd to document their journey out to the West.

For those of you who never had to take California history as a high school graduation requirement, I'll give you some quick background.

The Donner Party was a wagon train going to California that got a late start, were slowed further by some rains and flooding, and got to Donner Pass about five or six six weeks later than they might have wished. An early blizzard hit and they got trapped there. Between avalanches and twenty-five foot drifts, you just can't move a Conestoga wagon. Some people died trying and were buried in the drifts. Trapped just short of safety, they had already gone through most of their supplies, so the oxen went first, then the mules, then the horses. Still starving and unable to move, they dug up their dead and ste them too.

The point is, in all the diaries, both of the ones who survived and the ones who didn't, there was no whining. There was no poor pitiful me. The researcher said the closest she came to whining was one entry where a survivor said that it had been "an uncommonly cold winter..."

Now I'm not trying to get into a contest as to who had things worse, but the point is that whining is unseemly. Cowboy up, Fer gawds sake.

If you don't want to be in a regional, go do something else. But don't whine incessantly. You're just coming across as a wuss.