Sunday, April 12, 2009

This I Know

"If I thought there was some god who really did care two hoots about people, and who watched 'em like a father and cared for 'em like a mother [...] You wouldn't find me just being gen'rally nice in the hope that it'd all turn out right in the end, not if that flame was burning in me like an unforgivin' sword. [...] [T]hat's what true faith would mean, y'see? Sacrificin' your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin' the truth of it, workin' for it, breathin' the soul of it. THAT'S religion. Anything else is just...is just bein' nice. And a way of keepin' in touch with the neighbours."
--Granny Weatherwax, of Terry Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum

"Sort of man they're like to send believes hard. Kills, and never asks why."
--Shepherd Book, of Joss Whedon's Serenity

"We are afraid to let people loose; we are afraid that the worst will happen as soon as the single individual feels like behaving as the single individual."
--Soren Kierkegaard, in his Fear and Trembling

Today is Easter, one of two holidays when even we who are less than impressed with the church dress up and present ourselves before the altar or the pulpit, to listen to - generally - a sermon expounding on God's great love for us and the miracle of his son rising from the dead for our sakes. We will, for the most part, listen politely if not attentively, we will sing the songs and pass the offering plate or basket along. And we will see around us smiling, friendly faces. Some may even be moved by the sermon. But on the whole, we will see no passion. And if we see it, it will fade soon enough.

The church has lost its passion, just like Mightily Oates and the Omnians. And who can blame it? This world is not suited to sword-brandishing zealots. The power remains; it is the expression of it which has been lost. Perhaps the church is afraid of its zealots, as Kierkegaard points out. Perhaps it has merely realized that zealots who believe so hard that they would kill "without asking why," as Book says, are out of their time in history. Those few who retain their fiery belief, like Granny and Mal, find themselves increasingly irrelevant or simply unheard, out on their fringes of society.

When they are heard of, though, they are inspiring. They awaken that flame in others; they make us long for opportunities in which to be heroic and noble. But the reality is that most of us do not have the self-will necessary to maintain that passion. We may find it briefly stirred, whether by an Easter sermon or an "I aim to misbehave" speech, but we cannot fuel it on our own. Perhaps we are incapable; perhaps we are unwilling to offer our very selves to the flame. 

There is another place for that belief, and those of us who are just strong enough to know that we have not the strength of a zealot have used it all along. Rather than make our belief a thing we live for, we make it a thing to live from. Instead of a flame, it is a rock, a solid foundation upon which we stand and from which we make our forays - into the world, into thought, into life. 

Christians like to say that Jesus is "the Lord of my life." But having a lord to fight for implies that passionate belief of which so many are incapable. Rather we should say that one's god is the reality through which one sees the world. A god, a real god, is not some kind of superhuman, but as theologians say, a transcendent being. A god transcends even the normal modes of existence to become the basis for the existence of his followers.

There are those of us cursed with constant thought. We cannot help but wonder and explore. Some of us wonder about mechanics and natural physics, and these minds give us things such as steam engines; some of us wonder about nature and life, and these minds give us medical treatments and cures; and some of us wonder about the nature of reality. We give the world nothing but questions and uncertainty, although in far lesser amounts than we ourselves harbor. But those who think the strongest, the most, and clearest, have a basis from which they work. These bases differ, but it is because of these rock-solid beliefs, these parameters of "this I know," that they are able to face deeper and more disturbing questions than any others.

An absolute, all-encompassing certainty gives us a Granny, a Mal, a zealot... a closed mind with a definite cause. A small amount of certainty gives us not a closed mind but an open one, one from which we can even be comfortable questioning the nature of reality. The nature of the statement "this I know" gives rise to the question "what do I not know?" and is the foundation for exploration. It acknowledges our inability to believe heart and soul in a single purpose and gives us room to question while offering a safe return.

This foundation may change over time as the questions turn inward and onto our selves and our beliefs. But having a foundation is what enable us - and it - that possibility. Almost none of us can sustain the certainty that everything we know is true, but we can sustain a small certainty. Coupling that small certainty with the necessary complementary uncertainty produces thought, and thought, in time, produces more certainty. Perhaps we will once again have a place for zealots, and until then, the belief which remains - which always remains - gives us a base for reality.

Friday, November 21, 2008

How crazy is River Tam?

Original, I know, but I think we all have to examine exactly what constitutes craziness for ourselves, and Firefly* is a logical starting point for me (total nerdery: check).

River seems to cross between craziness and normality without much warning or incentive. She often doesn't appear to recognize 'normal' objects (like guns in "Objects in Space") or differentiate between a 'normal' form of objection (sticking her tongue out) and 'crazy' forms of objection (slashing Jayne's chest, although some would argue that this is in fact a very normal thing to do). Her condition is probably best and most succinctly put by Wash and Zoe: "What's she going to do next?" "Either blow us all up or rub soup in our hair, it's a toss-up**." 

We've established, then, that River is... not normal. Is she therefore crazy? insane? What's the difference? Leave that question for a moment while we discuss something entirely different.

Social responsibility is another one of those things that everyone eventually has to examine for himself or herself. What many of us don't realize is that we start thinking about this from a preformed set of assumptions. These assumptions are things like, "We don't kill people without good reason" but can be as simple as "We don't cut in line." We start from these conclusions when we ask "Under what circumstances would it be acceptable to kill someone?" We're assuming, with this question, that there are circumstances in which it would be acceptable (at least to ourselves) to kill someone. To return to Firefly, even Jayne, who would (and did) sell out the crew for the right amount, has his own set of morals: "Hell, I'll kill a man in a fair fight. Or if I think he's gonna start a fair fight, or if he bothers me, or if there's a woman, or if I'm gettin' paid - mostly only when I'm gettin' paid. But [...] eatin' people alive? Where does that get fun?" Even Jayne has his limits.

To put it another way, let's butcher classical French philosophy: Rousseau's Social Contract***. Essentially, we're all in this together. None of us had a choice about being here, but since we are here, let's play nice. It's expected that we won't kill each other, rob each other, scribble in each other's books, or cut in line, and it's expected that our parents and other adults teach us these things as children. How many of us, as three-year-olds, hit the neighbor kid in the head so we could play with his truck, only to be grabbed by our mothers and told, "No, no. We don't hit. That's not nice."

We're expected to be nice. Those of us who aren't - those who run through the store, knocking things off of shelves or those who kick pigeons when we walk through the park (I confess I am guilty of this) - are looked at as if we have done some horrible, rude, offensive thing. Technically, nobody has said, "Don't knock everything off the shelves." It's vandalism, sure, and there are laws against that, but if one managed to do it without damaging anything? No laws have been broken. It's legally okay, and it's legally okay because no one thought that we needed to have laws against it: we're expected to play nice.

There are always those who don't play nice, those who look at the rules and think, "These don't apply to me if I don't want them to." Take Carcer Dun, of the Discworld^ series. Sam Vimes is trying to arrest Carcer, who looks at him and asks, quite innocently, "But what did I do?^^" After he escapes, Captain Carrot asks Vimes exactly what Carcer is guilty of. "He's just guilty^^," Vimes answers, not because he, Vimes, is a bully who likes to arrest people who irritate him, but because, as he explains later, some people are just naturally guilty. He calls it having a criminal soul - people who would steal the humanity from others.

These are the people we call 'insane.' They know "the rules," they simply choose not to abide by them. Very frequently, they break laws and can therefore be incarcerated, but it is certainly possible to be a Carcer Dun without doing anything technically illegal. Sometimes they go over a certain edge and this, I would argue, is when we see serial killers and the like. Certainly there are exceptions to this, but in most cases, when we see these people after their capture, are we not chilled? Who could do this, we ask ourselves; have they no remorse? They haven't. They have chosen to break the social contract, and it is for this we condemn them as guilty. It may require prosecuting them for murder through the court system, but every person who sees this behavior knows that the perpetrator is really guilty of stealing the humanity from others.

Here is where I propose the difference between 'insane' and 'crazy.' This behavior is not the behavior of River Tam. There may be malice in her actions, but it is directed at those who made her the way she is; it is no more than revenge. Those who are 'insane' have seen the social contract and broken it; River, I think, has trouble understanding what language the social contract is in, so to speak. She has lost her bearings.

It is appropriate that we meet River as she emerges from a sealed cryogenic chamber, and that we continue to see her aboard a spaceship; these are metaphors for her mental state. She is isolated from 'the real world,' from any concept of normality, and she only touches sanity briefly, the way Serenity lands on a world only to take off quickly. We begin to see her find her bearing in Serenity the movie, and although she will always be separate from and different than the rest of the world, she may yet learn to relate to it on its terms - on the terms we all accept as so basic we often have no conscious realization of them. This is River's 'craziness,' that she cannot understand the social contract. She is not insane in the way that I define insanity; she has not deliberately broken the social contract. She is simply - hopefully temporarily - incapable of understanding the social contract. But it wasn't a choice on her part, and it is possible that there is at least a partial cure; she is merely 'crazy,' and she may one day be termed 'normal.' 

And there you have it: insanity and craziness defined in terms of social responsibility. I wonder how much I've inadvertently stolen from Rousseau and his colleagues? 

*Firefly was a television show that aired on FOX for eleven episodes in 2002. It was unrated. Fans rioted after the series was cancelled mid-season, eventually leading to production of a full-length movie and release of the TV series on DVD. Copyright Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy.

**Quoted from Firefly, the episode titled "Objects in Space."

***Social Contract was written in French by Jean-Jacques Rousseau some time in the 1700s, probably the 1780s. No, I don't know exactly when, nor have I read it in its entirety, nor do I know who publishes it or what copyright it is. (The text is public domain, but each translation is individually copyrighted.) My apologies to Rousseau's ghost for probably misinterpreting everything he said.

^(I was losing track of the numbers of asterisks.) The Discworld series is an ongoing series by British author Terry Pratchett, published in paperback form by Harper Torch. All characters and titles are copyright Terry Pratchett.

^^These quotes are inexact, but the general idea is taken from Night Watch, a Discworld book.

^^^Yes, I know the credits and references probably constitute a full third of the article by now.  I also know it is disjointed and may not make very much sense to you. To this I reply, Nuts to you.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Screw cockroaches

If there is ever a giant thermonuclear explosion that wipes 99% of life off the face of the planet, librarians will be the ones to survive.

Why, you ask? Consider this:

How do you treat your books? Do you treat them well, handling them only with clean hands and never, ever eating while reading or breaking the binding by opening the book too far? Now consider how you treat library books, which aren't yours and are probably already in declining conditions (or they will be soon, anyway)? Now consider this from the point of view of the average library patron.

You may consider yourself an average person, and you may be a library patron. However, this does not necessarily mean you are an average library patron.

The average library patron:
-reads a sign, then asks exactly the same question the sign answered
-asks to renew an item, even though it has a sticker on the front that says in big red letters THIS ITEM CANNOT BE RENEWED
-reshelves books in the wrong place (want to piss off your librarian? That's a good start)
-leaves piles of unwanted books/puzzles/hand puppets/movies on the floor because "they pay people to pick that up"
-pays a $75 fine with a shrug and an 'oh, well,' but argues for fifteen minutes over a ten-cent fine
-shows up five minutes before closing and takes ten minutes to decide on a movie, then remembers that the library card is sitting on the counter at home
[I swear to you, dear readers, I could not make this shit up.]
-allows his/her children (who are probably sick) to handle books with unwashed, jelly-sticky, snot-dripping hands
-pretends ignorance when the dog chews a book (I love dogs, but they have all kinds of nastiness in their mouths. They eat poop and dead birds, for God's sake!)
-doesn't clean a book when the baby spits up over it

Do you see where I'm going with this? Library books are NASTY. They are germ havens. Forget public toilets and trash cans; library books should be able to kill you if you walk in the damn building.

And yet...

Librarians don't get sick very much. When was the last time you saw a librarian sniffling? During cold season, there might be one or two. But librarians are part-time people. If we don't work, we don't get paid, and so we learn not to get sick. Not to hide getting sick, although that happens too, but somehow our bodies adapt to all these horrific germs infesting us day after day and we just don't get sick.

Cold season? Yeah, I got a bit of a runny nose.
Flu season? Yeah, my sister missed work for a week.
Heatstroke risk? Eh, the library's air-conditioned.
Outbreak of plague? Hm, we're not seeing as many patrons as we usually do.
War of the Worlds-style alien invasion? We've got some literature on that in the 200s.*
Thermonuclear explosion that takes out 99% of earthly life? I wonder if we should start issuing cards to cockroaches...

*A million bonus points to you if you get that joke.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

The Nature of Normality & The Things We Know

I have been thinking rather a lot lately, and this is part of what I have come up with.

People like normality, at least experientially. That is, we like the everyday life we experience to be normal. Today I will go to work and perhaps finish that project and hopefully not see too many crazy customers; maybe I’ll see the hot chick in HR; I don’t feel like going out tonight, so maybe I’ll stay home and watch the game; gotta remember to pick up some beer on the way home; shit, my rent is due tomorrow and they’ll throw my ass out if I don’t get it in on time; I’ll hit the bank on my way home, and, yeah, I can start reading that book tonight is considered a perfectly normal train of thought. We expect, in fact, to see the future, and what we expect to see is remarkably similar to the past. Fortunately for our psyches, reality often agrees with us, and the future is really just more of the past. And we like it this way.

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, more than one of the characters marvel that humanity, of all the species and their oddities, has the ability to create boredom. With such an awe-inspiring world around us, we are so frequently simply bored. It is a remarkable ability. It is also necessary. If we spent all day admiring the natural symmetry of a leaf, we would accomplish nothing and quickly starve, or die as a less appreciative but more practical creature had us for dinner. Boredom, and with it the concept of normality, allow us to exist and even think ourselves rational.

Being the intelligent creatures we supposedly are, however, we are aware that we create this necessary normality and almost instantly demand abnormality in the form of excitement. We love stories about superspies and car chases and, of course, lots of explosions and intrigue and drama. But even here we show our distaste for anything outside the norm – the Good Guy fights Evil and prevails. Sometimes the Good Guy is the Good Girl, and sometimes the hero is a tragic or troubled hero, and sometimes the hero dies. But good always triumphs over evil, at least in the metaphorical sense.

We know that good triumphs over evil because it has been drilled into us that good will always triumph over evil. The hero may give his life for the protection of others or the continuation of the Great Struggle Against The Evil Power, but in doing so, defeats the idea that evil wins. Sometimes the Good Guy loses and hangs his head in the defeat of shame, but the mere fact that we sympathize with him – or condemn him for his mistakes – only further supports that we expect Good to Triumph Over Evil. Sometimes we root for the “Bad Guy,” who is in quotes because he’s really not that bad, or because he’s amusing, or because he has redeeming qualities, or because we feel bad for him and his tragic past, or because the Good Guy is so dang perfect we want to see him get a little dirt on his pretty costume. Very few of us root for Evil.

But sometimes, some of the best storytellers show us, Evil – the true Evil, not just badness, but the evil that chills your soul and makes you want to snuggle with someone to have the reassuring presence of another human being near, the evil that lurks at the back of our darkest impulses and that we squelch so completely we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking it’s gone – well, sometimes evil wins. Evil shows up in the nightmares that wake us in a cold sweat, and when we’re horrified but not surprised to hear of the travesties humans commit upon each other.

We know this capital-e Evil exists and is part of us, and we know even more strongly that most of our nature wants nothing to do with it. It is the impulse to exorcise this evil that prompts our desire for normality. Evil has no place in normality. Nor does greatness, to flip the coin, but it is the price we pay and we are happy to pay it. So long as we do not have to walk that thin and ever-fragile line between greatness and evil, the balance which some call existentialism that exists so far beyond our paltry normality, we are happy.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Sum Literatus

I have been wondering lately, and the nature of these wonderings should tell the reader all he ever need know about the way my mind works. I have been wondering about the role of linguistics in philology. 

I am a scholar; I call myself a philologist.* My passion is for words and their meaning. Where exactly does meaning lie? When do ink marks on a page form letters, and when do those letters form meaningful words - can words on their own be meaningful, or do they require a greater context?

Yes, I am a nerd. I'm fine with that. I study what fascinates me, and these studies draw my time and attention as irresistibly as flowers draw bees. (Given my habit of forgetting to eat and sleep while I work, the flower in question may be more akin to a Venus' fly-trap rather than, say, a daisy.)

But I have no interest in linguistics. On a good day, I could give a hazy kinda-sorta definition of a phoneme, maybe. I don't know what a transitive passive verb form is, nor a "1sg (pronomial) possessor NP with a 3sg non-pronomial possessor NP."** Nor do I care. 

I am vaguely aware that this probably makes me a bad, lazy or selfish scholar. But, my lazy, selfish scholar counters, how do experts get to be experts if not by focussing on what fascinates them? And technical linguistics bores me immensely.

However, linguistics does fall under the general heading of philology. Lately, philology has come to mean the study of words in the context I use - that of words and their meaning. But the technical heading still applies.

So here is my dilemma: do I bore myself with linguistics, thus rounding out my philology? or do I ignore linguistics, possibly selling myself short on information, and instead delight in the discovery that the OED lists Shakespeare as the probable neologist behind generous and other such surprises?

My hope is to aim for a happy middle ground, perhaps more on the side of meaning-weighted philology than exactly in the center, but one which acknowledges the existence and possible value of basic linguistic study while spending the majority of my academic energy on my chosen field of eventual expertise.


*Sentence structure borrowed from Laurie R. King's excellent Beekeeper's Apprentice series, exact book unknown. This citation is probably not important, but I like to give credit where credit is due, at least if it's something worthwhile.

**Actual quote from UPenn's Language Log.

Monday, September 08, 2008

It's That Time Again

or, Spoiler Alert, part I-have-lost-track

I promise that I will eventually discuss something other than Batman and bad romance novels, but there have been a lot of Batman materials streaming through the library lately, and it brings to mind a question much discussed by, well, pretty much anyone who's seen the latest film. Besides which, it's really more of a jumping-off point for something else I want to talk about.

Before I discuss said question, let me reiterate my spoiler warning: I am going to talk about things that happened in Batman: Dark Knight. If you haven't seen it and don't want to know ahead of time what happens, STOP READING. Carrying on, then.

In the previous Batman movie, Rachel promises Bruce that although she cannot be with him at that time, she will wait for him and they can be together when Gotham no longer needs Batman. Bruce obviously treasures this promise, but it is not until the end of Dark Knight that we see how much he has relied upon it. The day - or possibly a few days - before she dies, Rachel gives Alfred a note to pass along to Bruce "when the time is right." She gives him permission to read it, so that he will know exactly when that time is. 

In the note, Rachel states that she can no longer wait for Bruce, as she believes that there will never be a day when Bruce himself does not need Batman, even though Gotham might someday not need him. Thus she unknowingly removes that foundation upon which Bruce - and therefore Batman - has built his morality. (He is seen on at least one occasion to avoid killing a person because "she [Rachel] wouldn't want me to.") 

After Rachel's death, Alfred thinks to give the note to Bruce, but is stopped by his comment: "She was going to wait for me. Rachel was going to wait for me." He instead takes the note away and burns it, telling Bruce when he asks that "it can wait." Before we question the rightness of Alfred's actions, there is one more question we must pose: what would have happened to Bruce, to Batman, if that illusion would have been taken from him?

It seems fairly evident, given Bruce's fragile grasp of morality and willingness to engage in what might be called fighting dirty, that Batman walks a very thin line between right and wrong and cannot always be said to land on the 'right' side. Still, he makes an effort to do so, even if his morality is based on the perceived wishes of another person. But it can be argued, rather successfully, that removing the base of Batman's morality - his constant striving to impress, live up to, and earn the respect of Rachel - would topple him into an amoral abyss, in which he would act and react using only his grief and rage as bearing-points.

In simple terms, removing the illusion of Rachel's eternal love would more than likely turn Batman into someone like the Joker, Two-Face, or worse.

Alfred, an individual who knows his master and is not unintelligent, would certainly have realized this, and he saw it as his duty to prevent such a thing from happening. To his knowledge, Rachel had told no one else of her decision to wait for Bruce in the first place, nor of her decision to wait no longer. Rachel was unmistakably dead; Bruce would have no opportunity to hear the truth except in Rachel's note. So the note was destroyed, and Alfred presumably succeeded in averting tragedy and pain on an unheard-of scale. 

But wait - say some - it wasn't Alfred's place to burn the note. He should have given it to Bruce eventually. Let Batman wrestle his own demons; don't take the choice from him.

There is a philosophy of thought, called existentialism by some, although its proponents reject such labels, which advocates - in a small and inadequate summary - personal responsibility, a foregoing of excuses, and strength of mind to see the world as it is and understand one's own place in it. Most agree that the world is a pretty sucky place and people are, by and large, stupid, with some exceptions. Some existentialists say that the only responsible reaction to the realization of the nature of the world and people is suicide; some say that this same realization makes suicide the most cowardly of responses. It is a polarizing philosophy.

Regardless of the suicide debate, all existentialists generally agree that the personal responsibility extends beyond one's own person. That is, if one is capable of preventing a tragedy and does not, one is equally culpable with the the actual perpetrator. (Again, this is a summation of a few hundred years of thought and discussion by people vastly more intelligent than your author.) The second-to-bottom line (we're not quite done yet) is that they would have a definite - and, I think, reasonable - response to Alfred's behavior: he not only didn't do wrong, he did what he was responsible for doing

Alfred knew his master: Bruce was, regardless of his thrilling heroics, an unstable, emotionally cauterized individual whose sanity and morality depended on a single other person and who depended on others to do what he needed them to do regardless of their personal thoughts or feelings. Crucify me if you will, but it must be said: Batman's a bastard. And it wouldn't take much to push him from 'bastard, yes, but necessary and helpful' to 'oh god oh god what's he done now, the bastard?' Knowing that Rachel wasn't planning to wait for him would have been that push and more. 

And Alfred wasn't inserting himself into his master's life uninvited, which is another cliched can of slimy conundrums; Rachel gave him permission to read the note and decide the right time to give it to Bruce: 'never' is a viable timeline. Alfred knew his master, knew that he would never be ready to hear the news of what he would see as a betrayal, particularly in light of Rachel's death. The bottom line (we're here) is this: Alfred not only did right, he would have been wrong to do anything else.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

The Poker Philosophy

On  Terry Pratchett's Discworld, the disc (comparable to our 'the earth') functions not on a magnetic field but on a magical one. This causes all kinds of problems and makes life more interesting but occasionally much shorter. The mundane practicality of it, if anything on the disc can be called mundane, comes to this: if one believes something, it is likely to come into existence on the disc. Monsters under the bed, for example, are physical realities. Most adults cannot see them, as they have trained their minds to ignore such things, and the reverse-existence rule is true: lack of belief in a thing causes it to become nonexistent. Children, trolls, gnomes, and wizards, all of which coexist more or less peacefully, depending on current events and the proximity of Koom Valley Day, not only believe in but also see said monsters. 

Miss Susan, adopted granddaughter of the anthropomorphic personification of Death, governess and schoolteacher, terror of bogeymen, and generally practical person, can see monsters as well, usually to their surprise and imminent demise. At her first governessing (it's a word now) job, she tried to convince the children that the monsters under the bed, in the closet and lurking throughout the basement weren't real. She knew this to be untrue, but she also knew that monsters who find themselves un-believed-in will find another house to terrorize. The children were fully aware that the line "if you don't believe in them, they'll go away" was utter bullshit, and Miss Susan found very quickly that she would have to use more direct measures.

Enter the nursery poker. When the children noticed a monster in their room, they would run in terror to Miss Susan, who would tuck them back in and pretend not to notice, until she reached under the bed or in the closet to pull the monster out by its hair and threaten it with the poker. Usually the monsters were sufficiently frightened by the mere fact that they could be seen by an adult that they would leave. The more stubborn monsters simply got bashed with the poker. In Pratchett's words, "The children refused to disbelieve in the monsters because, frankly, they knew damn well the things were there. But she'd found that they could, very firmly, also believe in the poker."*

Entertaining? Yes. Practical? More than one might think. One of your author's sharpest complaints against certain people, most noticeably of the conservative Christian persuasion, is their ostrich mentality. They rail against creative fiction - the Hellboys and the Harry Potters - because these "encourage people to think of the world in a different way than God made it."** But these are the people who will not watch the news because it is "too depressing," who send their children to private school or homeschool and later to Christian colleges because they believe it will shield them from the evil of the world. (Note: sending your child to private school/homeschool because it will provide them with a better education is entirely different.)

This is a disservice to their children. Either the children will grow up and live inside a bubble, which is psychologically and socially unhealthy, or they will grow up in the bubble and someday be rudely introduced to the real world. This mentality is the same as knowing that a person will be walking into a dangerous situation and refusing to give them any means to defend themselves because "if you can't defend yourself, no one will attack you." The practical reality? They're going to have the shit kicked out of them.

The unpleasant, even brutal reality of the world is that it is a reality. Life does not work the same way it does in a Jeanette Oke or Max Lucado book. Things do not always end happily ever after; there are people who will attack an indefensible, innocent person precisely because he is innocent and indefensible. Instead of denying that such people and such realities exist, would it not be better to admit that such things are real, and dedicate ourselves to finding ways to stop them? There may well be a monster under the bed, and pretending it isn't there won't make it go away. Bashing it with the poker? Well, that might. 

At the end of Hogfather, Pratchett's book involving, among other things, the poker, Miss Susan kills a human monster in front of the children. She is berating her grandfather for not doing anything about the situation when he answers, "The world will teach them about monsters soon enough. Let them remember there's always the poker." Instead of the denial preached by some (I hasten to say not all) of the Christian community, let us remember that there is always the poker.

*Both quotes from Hogfather by Terry Pratchett, Harper Torch Publishing, copyright 1996, pages 23 and 343, respectively.

**This quote modified from an actual quote of the same sentiment by the author's mother.