Skip to main content

The gift of perspective: the sequel.

The second Sunday of 2017 strikes me as the perfect day for wading even more deeply into the waters of moral controversy than in my last post. So let me lay this one on you:

Pets and children do not understand the concept of "a necessary evil" or "for your own good." Therefore, from the vantage point of the pet or child, getting a vaccination or a nail trim may well be the same as, say, being sodomized with a pencil. We are the only ones in the scenario who are confident in the propriety of one act vs. the other. 

If you've ever seen a large recalcitrant dog getting its nails trimmed with a dremel, you know the phenomenon of which I speak. It is traumatizing for both the animal and the (uninitiated) observer; the dog will howl and bark and strain against any confinement as might another dog being frankly tortured (except in the case of a nail trim the animal has no recourse; if it's awake for the procedure, it's usually muzzled and held or tied down). Veterinary pros grow inured to the histrionics and shrug them off...just as I suppose serial pedophiles get used to the whimpers and/or screams of their young victims.

The same applies in the case of the severely vaccination-phobic child who's dragged kicking and screaming into the pediatrician's office.
This would be a good place to reiterate that we are talking from the point of view of the pet or child only. In no way does this post even begin to imply that those of us on the outside should regard pedophilia or torture as no more sinister than nail trimming or vaccinating. I'm speaking only of how your pet or child likely interprets those experiences.
So no, I am not proposing some bizarre false equivalence between pet groomers and/or pediatricians and pedophiles. I am saying that to the pet or child, the abuse is the same: Pain and terror are being inflicted while the people they trust most in life, Mommy and/or Daddy, are standing by and letting it happen. And it doesn't matter that the vet or pediatrician is speaking in consoling tones. Child molesters often do that too.

Think about it. And think about the fact that we often say that young victims of pedophiles are scarred for life. Just think about it. As always, that's all I ask here.

Popular posts from this blog

Adrift in the parkways of our minds?

Not far from where I write this is a very nice park, a true urban oasis: one of those elongated greenbelts that, together with the sweeping peripheral roads on either side, particularly lends itself to the description "parkway." For the past quarter-century, the park has been inhabited by a gentleman named Earl. It follows th at this gentleman, now nearing 70, bears the whimsical/romantic labe l "Ea r l of the P a rkway." Earl's exploits have been much-chronicled , such that he is today something of a f olk hero, albeit a melancholic one, among those who live in areas adjacent to the park. Strictly speaking, Earl doesn't have to live in the park. He has options. Many would thus say he chooses to live there. (Or, if we prefer not to use terminology that evokes issues of free will vs. determinism, we could posit simply and neutrally that Earl continues to live there, regardl ess of whether alternatives objectively exist.) You might say that based on that de

The folly of forensics: lessons from my egg roll.

If you made it all the way through my very long Skeptic article on the criminal-justice system, you know that eyewitness identifications — once viewed as the gold standard of guilt in criminal cases, especially rapes — are now being revealed as the shaky evidentiary tool that law-enforcement officials a lway s p rivately knew them to be. In fully 75% of the DNA-based exonerations wrought by the In nocence Project , there had been a positive ID at trial . Tonight I got a lesson from my egg roll in why so-called "forensics science" should probably be the next to go out the window. Some background. Sunday night after dinner I swept and vacuumed, and this morning my wife and I were both out of the house early without eating breakfast. In other words, nothing took place on the kitchen table all day until dinner. I was the first to arrive home, and in fact, when I walked into the house at about 4: 30, with the sun streaming through the blinds and across the hardwood floors of t

What we should expect from our news.

From time to time since February 2008, when my long article on journalism and the news media first appeared in the online version of Skeptic * , people have asked me for more specifics on what I regard as the building blocks of valid, serious-minded news coverage. This is going to be a lengthy post, so I'll dive right in without further preamble. The News must be apolitical. This line of thought reached critical mass in 2001 with the controversy over Bernie Goldberg and his muck-raking book, Bias ** , which savaged the mainstream media for its strong (and unapologetic) left ward tilt. It's a familiar argument by now and there's no need to go into it at any great length. I think we'd get a fairly universal buy-in—at least in principle—on the idea that the News should never have a specific political agenda, Left or Right. That consensus is likely to crumble a bit when you g et to a more pointed discussion of implementation. For example, we'd have no trouble finding