Shock And Ow

Leave a Comment / By Paul Hughes / May 3, 2016

I’ve had many exchanges over the years where my statement about something was taken as surprise at the event rather than what it was — which is anger over human inaction facing it.

Having worked 1.75 teenage males through the household over the last dozen years this has often been a thing one or the other has done that is so colossally moronic, amoral or both, I often go slack-jawed in apprehending it. Then everyone else goes slack responding to it.

Boys will be boys …

No or partly yes or who cares?

Boys will be jerks

is closer, but again — no, yes, so what?

The point is: what do we do now?

I’m not expressing shock. I want to know what will hurt enough in the way he conducts himself that it won’t happen again. Sometimes there is nothing. But every time we say boys will be boys there certainly will be nothing. It’s the beginning of the conversation not the end.

What I’m looking for is a response, even a solution.

I’m not surprised by the moment.

I want the next one.

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.] One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Random

Total Recall

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one … There was a woman who claimed to talk with God — not to Him, but with Him. The tale was well-told around town, in which there was also a priest. The priest one day after Mass asked to speak with the woman and when they’d settled

Kingdom In

When we hear of our twinclinations — the two tendencies within us all, one toward good and one toward ill — most time is spent on the first. Anyway I’ve spent most of my time on that — on being most concerned over time with what’s good and am I being that, and often justifying what doesn’t

Trouble and Strife

Septic tank is Cockney rhyming slang for “Yank” which may suggest what trouble and strife is slang for. But it’s not fair of course, and good men, and most men some of the time, know she’s not only that. Upon noting once how, yes, “children are a bother,” Dallas Willard made the important philosophical distinction

The Walmart Fairy

Want to know when you can be sure the economy is in the turlet? It’s when even Walmart’s not hiring. According to this item, the company has hired essentially nobody for the last six years. Nobody says it’s since the bankers ripped us off again and the government let them, and all the oceans stopped

Related

People of Costco

We got some of our Christmas presents at Costco and I’m not sorry. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of volume discounting, for it is the confidence of 30 rolls of absorbent toilet paper and the power of barrels of mayonnaise unto certain kinds of satiation, and two items not unrelated in the

On the Rock

I often vow not to hope, and always break that vow. And the next thing I’m supposed to say is that finally my hopes are realized, my desires achieved and all my wildest dreams come true. But this is not what’s happening just now. Just now I break that vow and I don’t get what

All Things Considered

This could go a couple different ways. An image likes could be Veteran’s Day, it’s not, or Memorial Day which, though closer, it’s not. Could be about a song (actually a poem) I found only a few months ago or an automatically somber meditation on mortality that’s begun before you’ve even begun to read …

One Question, Two Answers

How to be really great Your life will be immeasurably great — incalculably awesome — if you put others in place of … you. We will be great if we put others before us. That is, if we put them first. One week at church, a pastor culled some points from a book on Christian