We have strange behaviors, such as drug use that leads to overdosing and death and food addictions that lead to obesity. And the shoes. Oh! The shoes. Three-inch stilettos, for example. And, if you are Dutch, klompen.
Crater-like depressions in foot bones examined by Leiden University bio-archaeologists seem to indicate nineteenth-century Dutch farmers suffered from a condition called osteochondritis dissecans probably caused by wearing Clogs. Klompen. Wooden shoes. No give. No Air Max.
Did they wear them because wood floats? They did live in the Netherlands. Or, were klompen as much a fashion statement as they were cheap and relatively practical. (Who needs a hoe when you can clomp your klompen on a clump of dirt?)
All of us have been slaves to fashion of some sort, and no doubt shoes have caused twentieth and twenty-first century foot problems just as nineteenth-century klompen did. As researcher Andrea Waters-Rist comments, “Look at what high heels do: the constriction of our toes, the strain it places on our joints. If bio-archaeologists were to come along in 100 or 500 years and look at the bones of our feet—would they ask, what on Earth were these people wearing?”*
And if anthropologists were to come along in 100 or 500 years and attempt to unravel the problems of our times and the stances we took, would they also find damage caused by our strict adherence to fashionable and inflexible thinking? All of us put on mental klompen at times. They’re inflexible, and we know that. But we wear those inflexible intellectual fashions anyway.
On occasion, we should look at the base of our stance. Maybe we should insert some cushioning, flexible intellectual orthotics before we stand for or against something. Yes, the hard fashion might enable us to clomp on our opponent’s ideas, but if the shoe is wooden, it damages the foot inside.
*Sims, Jane. Western University researcher finds Dutch wooden clogs did physical damage. The London Free Press, Thursday, November 16, 2017 Online at http://www.lfpress.com/2017/11/16/western-university-researcher-finds-dutch-wooden-clogs-did-physical-damage
Crater-like depressions in foot bones examined by Leiden University bio-archaeologists seem to indicate nineteenth-century Dutch farmers suffered from a condition called osteochondritis dissecans probably caused by wearing Clogs. Klompen. Wooden shoes. No give. No Air Max.
Did they wear them because wood floats? They did live in the Netherlands. Or, were klompen as much a fashion statement as they were cheap and relatively practical. (Who needs a hoe when you can clomp your klompen on a clump of dirt?)
All of us have been slaves to fashion of some sort, and no doubt shoes have caused twentieth and twenty-first century foot problems just as nineteenth-century klompen did. As researcher Andrea Waters-Rist comments, “Look at what high heels do: the constriction of our toes, the strain it places on our joints. If bio-archaeologists were to come along in 100 or 500 years and look at the bones of our feet—would they ask, what on Earth were these people wearing?”*
And if anthropologists were to come along in 100 or 500 years and attempt to unravel the problems of our times and the stances we took, would they also find damage caused by our strict adherence to fashionable and inflexible thinking? All of us put on mental klompen at times. They’re inflexible, and we know that. But we wear those inflexible intellectual fashions anyway.
On occasion, we should look at the base of our stance. Maybe we should insert some cushioning, flexible intellectual orthotics before we stand for or against something. Yes, the hard fashion might enable us to clomp on our opponent’s ideas, but if the shoe is wooden, it damages the foot inside.
*Sims, Jane. Western University researcher finds Dutch wooden clogs did physical damage. The London Free Press, Thursday, November 16, 2017 Online at http://www.lfpress.com/2017/11/16/western-university-researcher-finds-dutch-wooden-clogs-did-physical-damage
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