OK, I know I shouldn’t hurt anybody, especially my own kids, but it’s not like I was going to cut his penis off or anything! Just part of it. It doesn’t hurt that much.

First of all, we haven’t established any reference that allows for your qualifying article – what line does your “that” indicate that you haven’t crossed? “That” much? Do they do that rubbish in other languages, “that” and “so” with no reference, is that standard rhetorical trickery? Not “that” much so that what? Just not “so” much so I disagree? It doesn’t hurt that much – not enough for it to matter and not enough for you to have to take any complaints about it? Or is it simply the line between hurts you want to give and hurts you don’t want to go to jail for? Not cutting off “so” much of him that it counts as assault?

The line between hurts that a person can appear to heal from and the ones where everybody knows you destroyed your own child? I know it “could be worse.” Of course you could simply murder the kid, torture him to death, you’re not doing that – who am I negotiating with here? Who wanted that and we’re paying them a tithe, offering them a little bit of blood to get them by, but not the whole feast?

That’s almost a joke, the rhetoric bit. The times “so” and “that” have been used on me most memorably were not arguments with classicists or logicians, ha. I suspect most folks just think they are simple qualifiers and use them to amplify their statements more with feeling than proof. Most folks engage in a somewhat less conscious, less technical and culpable form of rhetoric, and most arguments are verbal and no-one ever reviews each other’s skills. For me, though, circumcision, besides being a world of trouble all its own, is one piece of a disturbing pattern of behaviour for the subject in question, the human being.

Arguments like the above work, or work well enough, too bloody well for my liking: circumcision, “spanking,” all manner of hardship and deprivations are defended and explained this way, by not being “that” bad, or “so” bad, and it’s become rather inescapable to me – how is it not to us all – that we seem to love a certain amount of bad, about half the time, the time we’re not spending telling the world how we hate it and wish it away, we are making sure everybody gets a share that gets as close to the line of “that” bad as possible or we wouldn’t be talking about whether or not we’ve crossed it all the bloody time.

“Everybody else” wouldn’t have apparently either crossed it or never gotten close enough to it if there did not exist some awful line of hurting our own kids that we are all compelled to approach, some default level of abuse our children must suffer, in our minds, or in our world. This sick “thought,” this is the “human nature” we want to blame, that we want to say we are helpless before, the devil in Darwin’s world, simply this . . . strategy, is what we would rather blame than change. Unconscious mostly, sure.

Maybe I’m looking at an extreme version of this human nature, sure, among white people as they do the fascist/Nazi thing again, sure.

All I’m saying is, why you gotta hurt me at all? Why do you have to hurt me “not that much?”

And I’m not being rhetorical, as we are when we talk about this stuff. “Why” is a question, and yes, I’ve heard society’s answers, the old wives’ tales, I am one of you, believe it or not, and it is a piece of evidence for my thesis that you can imagine I disagree with discipline and punishment simply because I haven’t heard the lessons, or that I need to hear them one more time! The cow says “moo” and the sheep says “baa” and the human says “you have to teach them right from wrong,” that’s how that goes. I’ve heard it a time or two. “Why?” is a question here for science.

Why do all these old wives think I need to be a certain amount of hurt?

I mean, I’ve answered it, but who am I?

Clearly, people need to see it answered by someone who matters. I, personally, need to know that someone who matters is looking into it, otherwise I’m the Medicine Man, found the cure and lost it when I lost my life, failed to pass it on and the truth dies with me and the lies live forever. Come on, folks, that’s over the line. Don’t do me like that.

 

Jeff

April 21^st., 2020