A SECURITY services salesperson just showed up at my door. I’d name the company, but I really don’t feel like getting sued today. Suffice it to say you’ve heard of it.

“We’re offering an advertising special,” he opened. “If you’ll display our yard sign and window decal, we’ll install the electronics for free and only charge you the monthly monitoring fee.

“Suppose I take the service but refuse to display the signs,” I said. “Then what will the electronics and installation cost me?”

“Nothing,” he replied, “just the monthly.”

“Two things,” I said. “First, I don’t need the service. I have a four-legged, 60-pound security system with a full set of teeth. The only reason she hasn’t had you for an afternoon snack is that I gave her a stay command. That, and because she ate the UPS guy for breakfast, so she’s still full.”

He looked past me at my dog and allowed that she is a beauty. Which she is.

“Second,” I continued, “—and please know that my gripe is not with you, but with the company that fed you this pitch—there’s no advertising special. That’s evident from the fact that the price is the same either way. So your employer has trained you to use a sales pitch that opens with a lie. I suggest you go back and yell at your employer. Ask them not to make you lie.”

He was gracious. He thanked me. Then he went to the next house.

1

I was searching for a cartoon of an irrational, ranting person to go with a bit of humor writing. Before long, I found just the image.

Well, almost.

The facial expression was right. The body language was dead-on. The art was hilarious.

The problem? The cartooned person was female. And had red hair.

Women, especially redheaded women, don’t need more crap, I thought. I continued my search and found a better cartoon. It wasn’t quite as funny, but that’s okay.

Spare me the “can’t they take a little ribbing?” speech. That’s a bully’s defense.

2

Near my house sits an Asian restaurant whose name sounds rather unseemly when pronounced in American English.

It struck me as funny, so I made a meme.

I sat on it a while. In the end I decided against posting it.

Asian people don’t need more crap, I thought.

Spare me the “laughing-with-not-at” speech. That, too, is a bully’s defense.

3

“It’s getting to where you can’t make fun of anyone,” a friend whined.

Not so. Some movements, institutions, and individuals deserve mockery. I submit Christian nationalism, Fox News, and Trump.

But an entire population is rarely fair game, and a disadvantaged population never is. Mocking the latter arguably constitutes a verbal hate crime, contributes to violent hate crime, and helps inure the public to the prevalence and horror of violent hate crime.

Some of my right-leaning friends (how far do they lean? Clunk!) criticize me for trying to be “so woke.”

I find it revealing, and not a little disheartening, that anyone would make a call to awareness, empathy, and common courtesy into a pejorative.

That, too, is a bully’s defense.

♦

A meme making the rounds says, essentially, that because Ukraine is war-torn and we’re not, “… it’s time that we all be a lot more thankful and definitely more grateful.”

I cannot begin to express my contempt for that shallow recycling of Think you have troubles? There are people who have it worse, you know and There but for the grace of God go I.

Never mind that “a lot more thankful and definitely more grateful” is the kind of redundancy that suggests a simpleton’s aspiring to profundity. The notion that someone else’s horrible circumstances should make us happy about our own fortuitous ones is galling in its inhumanity. No better is the underlying suggestion that complacency at home is the proper response to someone’s having it worse abroad.

On the contrary, the situation in Ukraine should fill us with  compassion for Ukrainians and horror for Putin. At home, it should galvanize us against the least degree of tyranny, violence, inequity, injustice, racism, intolerance, misinformation, environmental assault, and other ills—not make us grateful that such could be worse.

Far from “a lot more thankful and definitely more grateful,” I am concerned. Deeply so.

Today’s post on my RESPONSE Agency blog discusses wedding cake vendor bigotry. It’s short. If you would care to read it, please click here.

IN HIS COLUMN today regarding the Ahmaud Arbery case, George F. Will claims that hate crimes are actually thought crimes, and that expressing horror at them is naught but virtue signaling.

(No, I won’t link to his column. It is odious, and I prefer not to help it organic search-wise any more than necessary.)

I find it hard to imagine that a mind as acute as Will’s truly fails to grasp the concept of hate crime. Will, of all people, surely knows that hate crime is not the same as thought crime. Hate crimes are terrorist acts that target specific populations.

No one in the U.S. goes to jail for hateful thinking. But if you assault The Other for being The Other, you terrorize other Others, and you damn well should go to jail for it—over and above going to jail for the assault itself.

Granted, hate crime isn’t the best moniker. Unfortunate nomenclature plagues many a worthy cause. Black Lives Matter, not the best moniker. Defund the Police, not the best moniker. But it’s incumbent upon decent people, and especially upon writers of Will’s stature, to inform themselves — and their readers! — of what a movement truly stands for. To argue against what the uniformed think a term means as opposed to what it actually means is brazen intellectual dishonesty. It is the antithesis of what is known in debate circles as the Principle of Charity.

Do not let George Will and other fear-mongers worry you that prosecuting a hate crime is a walk in the park. To prove he killed them because they were black as opposed to he killed them and they happened to be black is notoriously difficult. When a hate crime is established to a jury’s satisfaction, it is not to be taken lightly.*

If you so much as glanced at the evidence in the Ahmaud Arbery case, you are most likely aware (even if unwilling to concede) that because he was black came through loud and clear.

So, no, Mr. Will, Ahmaud Arbery’s killers were not convicted “because of their benighted beliefs.” They were convicted for committing the kind of racially motivated murder that, unchecked, has the effect of terrorizing all African Americans.

And: Virtue signaling? Really?

Virtue signaling, a term that the empathy-deprived seem to thrive on flinging of late, is a propagandist tool used to dismiss laudable actions by accusing the person taking them of a holier-than-thou attitude. It is the would-be sophisticate’s version of calling someone a goody two-shoes. It’s a nifty and flagrantly dishonest way to divert attention from the issue to the character and intent of the person raising it.

I thought George Will was smarter than that. Or least not quite so dishonest. Or at least not quite so childish.

* Not that it is to be taken as holy writ. I am well aware that juries can and do err. No need to @ me on that one.

TWICE IN my life, a father figure showed up when I desperately needed one.

Later, I would learn that each man was guilty of something egregious.

With apologies to your curiosity, I shall not provide details. They would only get us off-track. Suffice it to say that the revelations knocked me for a loop.

An inner voice told me to hate them, to have nothing further to do with them. Yet I couldn’t. The kindness, validation, and support each had shown me was still there. Certainly the good did not erase the bad; but, at least for me, neither did the bad wipe out the good.

“Good person” versus “bad person” is a false dichotomy. Human character comprises many parts, each landing somewhere along its own acceptability continuum.* Some people land consistently near either extreme, but most — including you and me — land in different places on different continua.

Consciously or not, we average the continua, and choose to write off some people and not others.

Some of my friends hold views that I find odious. It’s a charge falling well short of “guilty of something egregious,” yet sometimes someone will ask how I can be friends with “a person like that.”

We love not just because but also despite.

This morning I heard from an aspiring biographer with no better sense than to ask for my thoughts.

In the book he has under way, he attempts a psychological diagnosis of an historical figure. For a mental health professional, that’s already a risky proposition. For all but the most versed layperson, it can border on foolhardy. Worse, the American Psychological Association is considering retiring the diagnosis the writer came up with. They’re beginning to suspect it isn’t a thing.

All of which I pointed out.

The aspiring biographer was grateful for the tip. “Thanks,” he said, “I had no idea. I’ll do more research and fix that.”

Har! Just kidding. What he really said was, “I’m not a professional. These are my opinions. I urge readers to draw their own conclusions.”

Without realizing it, he had just defended perpetrating fake news. With bit of tweaking, his statement could be a slogan for Fox News or One America News Network.

I agree that writers can and should opine. But facts are not matters of opinion. I believe that writers have a responsibility to check and double-check anything they present as fact.

Moreover, writers must exercise caution when it comes to opining outside their respective areas of expertise. It’s wiser, more responsible, to quote, with attribution, experts from the field in question.

And, it should go without saying, it is imperative to be sure that quoted experts really are experts.

I hope he heeds the advice. No matter how well-intended, the world doesn’t need another Fox, OAN, Beck, Limbaugh, or Rogan.

“After reading the excerpt in the Salt Lake Tribune, my wife has discouraged me from reading your book. So congratulations on the book, but it is currently sitting on my dresser.”

So wrote a devout Mormon friend after purchasing a signed copy. I was disappointed but not surprised.

“I’m sure it is scholarly and well researched and well written,” he continued. “It’s the subject matter that concerns her—and me, frankly.”

Yet it was his closing comment that troubled me most: “You never know what that subject can do to ignite the wrong passions in a man.”

Ignite “the wrong passions”? I suppose I could have asked what he meant by that, but I didn’t need to. A former Mormon myself, I knew. He was worried that the book might get into his head, entice him to misbehave, and ultimately interfere with his access to guidance from the Holy Ghost.

All of which points to a cultish tactic that I find particularly disturbing.

Every cult leader understands, or at least intuits, that curtailing reading — aka keeping people in ignorance — is an effective means of keeping people in line. Hence the pre-Civil War American South criminalized teaching enslaved persons to read, Nazis burned books, and Christian extremists continue seeking to ban selected titles from public and school libraries.

The Mormon Church’s approach is a bit more subtle. Mormons simply dismiss any work casting the least shade on their religion as “anti-Mormon,” which is code for “you shouldn’t read this because it could challenge your faith or tempt you to be naughty.” And make no mistake: it is a threat that devout Mormons take seriously.

Which is rather revealing, for it tells you something about the fragility of and commitment to faith. Also revealing is that the panic doesn’t go both ways. I would never presume to tell my readers they “shouldn’t” read the Book of Mormon.

If you’re a Mormon and you’re worried that reading Behind the Mormon Curtain will shake your faith or lead you into sin, it seems to me that your faith and resolve could do with a good shaking. They will emerge stronger or weaker.

Either way, that is all the more reason to read it.

❖

Recently my personal values collided with my fiduciary responsibility. Please read the tale, which I share with some reluctance, by clicking here (which will take you to my other website).