The Catholic church, distressed about their reputation for molesting altar boys, has decided to be proactive.\u00a0 Their reasoning is that there will be fewer cases of sexual abuse if fewer abusers were allowed into the priesthood.\u00a0 On the surface, that makes a lot of sense but the devil is in the details.\u00a0 And where would Christianity be without the devil?<\/p>\n
Something must be done, preferably something more effective than putting “Are you a pedophile?” on the application form for seminary school.\u00a0 To accomplish this, the church will try to weed out people unable to resist every carnal impulse that pops into their heads.\u00a0 I have no idea how they will be able to test for that but if they manage to pull it off, so far so good.\u00a0 They also plan to exclude people who are or might be homosexual.<\/p>\n
Huh?\u00a0 All the gay dudes I know are attracted to grown men, not little boys.\u00a0 Keeping these guys out will not protect the children.\u00a0 There is a risk of priests getting it on with each other, which may or may not get God’s panties in a bunch, but that will result in neither traumatized youth nor expensive lawsuits.<\/p>\n
I’m not trying to bash Catholics here (I’ll save that for another post).\u00a0 What I’m attempting to do is point out the very human tendency to engage in massive oversteer to prevent bad things from ever happening again.<\/p>\n
For example, there was the case of that nutjob who murdered all those people at Virginia Tech last year.\u00a0 His killing spree understandably got people thinking about how to prevent such a tragedy from happening in the future.<\/p>\n
As one would expect, there was some bullshit being bandied about.\u00a0 Pat Buchanan, who is suspicious of anyone whose ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower<\/i>, pointed out that the killer was an immigrant and therefore not to be trusted.\u00a0 Never mind that America is perfectly capable of breeding its own whackos and the rest of Seung-Hui Cho’s family were by all accounts decent enough folks.\u00a0 Fortunately, Buchanan’s nativist rant fell largely on deaf ears.<\/p>\n
But if you can’t blame evil foreigners, then what?\u00a0 Well, there was a lot of postulation over how psycho Cho flipped his lid and what to watch out for in others who might do the same.\u00a0 There was no shortage of material to work with.\u00a0 Cho, who was an attention whore as well as a mass murderer, broadcast his insanity all over the internet and even went so far as to put together a press kit before he got busy with his guns.<\/p>\n
Psychologists, both professional and amateur, looked at his writings after the massacre and concluded that this was one messed-up guy.\u00a0 Since no one wants to see his actions turn into some sort of trend, they put forth a list of red flags for the rest of us to watch out for before things get ugly.<\/p>\n
Like all plans, this one works until it doesn’t.\u00a0 I myself had a troubled youth and although no one I knew from my early twenties was lining up to nominate me for sainthood, I managed to muddle through without killing anybody.\u00a0 During that time, I filled countless notebooks with misanthropic ramblings chock full of feelings of persecution and self pity.\u00a0 If there was such a thing as MySpace back then, I would have posted my words there as well.<\/p>\n
I was plenty dysfunctional but hardly unique.\u00a0 If you cast a net for every young person who is going through a rough period in the hope you’ll thwart a real killer, you’re going to expend a huge amount of effort harassing harmless neurotics.\u00a0 With all those false positives, how can you expect to find the one guy who is going to snap?<\/p>\n
Perhaps I’m being paranoid.\u00a0 Kids with problems aren’t being rounded up and thrown into loony bins.\u00a0 After all, it’s been more than a year.\u00a0 The bright shiny object that was the Virginia Tech massacre has dropped from many people’s radar.\u00a0 Each passing day brings the promise of news of a brand new horror, one that engage both our fears and our short attention spans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Catholic church, distressed about their reputation for molesting altar boys, has decided to be proactive.\u00a0 Their reasoning is that there will be fewer cases of sexual abuse if fewer abusers were allowed into the priesthood.\u00a0 On the surface, that makes a lot of sense but the devil is in the details.\u00a0 And where would … Continue reading Cornholes and Bullet Holes: Pounds of Prevention for an Ounce of Cure<\/span>