I found this image on Facebook. For those who can’t see it, it reads, “You are just as guilty as the abuser if you know about animal abuse and do nothing.” The poster, Valerie VanOrden, added, “Ditto with child abuse or over-correction.” I assume “over-correction” is a reference to corporal punishment of children. I understand this sentiment, so it is not my intent to attack Ms VanOrden. But I think this is wrong and even dangerous.

It is easy to be so outraged at a crime that one latches onto “enablers.” When it comes to child abuse, the act seems so heinous that it is easy to define the abusers as not even human. Thus the humans who we can empathize with are those we focus our rage on. After all, each of us has the experience of being in a situation where someone misbehaved and we did nothing. So in a weird kind of way, attacking such people in different circumstances can feel like making amends for our own acts of cowardice. But that doesn’t actually make the current or past situations any better.

Doing nothing when a child or an animal is abused is wrong. But such signs (and arguments) don’t say that. They explicitly equate the acts. And that is preposterous. For one thing, what exactly does it mean to “do nothing”? If you see a man kick his dog, is giving him a dirty look enough? What about saying something like, “Don’t kick that dog!”? Or perhaps kicking the man? None of these things will necessarily end the man’s behavior? Even getting the man arrested, convicted, and jailed may not stop his behavior. So what level of engagement is required?

It is very possible that the best thing you could do in that case would be to tell everyone you know about the awful man who kicked his dog. It isn’t legal penalties that are primarily responsible for the much better treatment of animals today versus 200 years ago. In Henry Bergh’s time, horses were commonly flogged to death on the streets of New York. Now such behavior would be unthinkable. So I’m not at all certain that expecting every person to turn into informants for the police is necessary or even especially helpful.

There is also the problem that people who abuse animals and children are probably dangerous people. So encouraging little old ladies to confront such sociopaths is not necessarily a great idea. And confrontations can make things worse. I say this as a person with a long history thrusting myself into such situations. They usually do quiet the situation in the short-term, but at the expense of causing the anger to be focused on me. That’s fine, but I’m not sure if it helps the situation in the long-term.

What’s more, the people who are most likely to know about abuse are people who are being abused themselves. For example, if there is an abusing father who is beating the children, he is probably also beating the wife. I know of a couple of cases of truly heroic women who got their children out of these situations — cases in which the women were willing to accept being abused themselves but not when the situation degenerated to include the children. But these women are heroes, and the last thing we should do is lay shame upon all similarly placed women who are not capable of the heroism the situation demands.

When it comes to things like Catholic bishops covering up for priests who sexually abused children, the situation is different. Moving priests to new areas where they could continue to abuse children could very well be as bad as or even worse than what the priests were doing. In these cases, the bishop was acting as a kind of pimp for unwanted sexual encounters. But I’m certain that the bishops didn’t see themselves as pimps. They probably thought that the priests were just having difficulties that the bishops could finesse. There was just one boy that the priest couldn’t resist. Or there was too much pressure on the priest. Or thousands of other justifications that the bishop used to allow the priest to continue preying on the young. This is a special kind of villainy, but mostly one where the bishops managed to delude themselves into thinking they were doing something other than what they were actually doing. That doesn’t reduce their culpability, of course.

The bishop situation is different because they were actively facilitating child rape committed by priests. The situations that people face in their everyday lives are quite different. If you think that a neighborhood child is being brutalized by his parents, you should do something about it. There is a moral imperative. But not doing so is not equal to brutalizing the child yourself. And claiming that it is minimizes the initial act of brutality.

The fine people at Vox have put together, How to Survive Your Family’s Thanksgiving Arguments. It deals with everything from football to Common Core to Bill Cosby. And it is really good — as usual. But I couldn’t help but notice a whole lot of avuncularism — or uncle bashing. Why is it always the drunk, Fox News watching uncle who everyone is protecting themselves from at the family gathering? As an uncle, I am sort of offended.

Do you know what I’m doing on today? I’m at my sister’s place cooking dinner. And do you know what I did yesterday? I spent all day cooking in preparation for today. Now you may think you have me, “If you are doing this, how is it that you are writing this article?! Hmm?” Well, I’m actually writing this on Tuesday and I started this article on Monday. Such is the commitment that I have to you, gentle reader, that I write like a madman before holidays so that you are constantly informed and entertained. Speaking of which, look: cool motorcycle dog:

Let’s consider the Midterm Elections. Brother says voting is pointless. Sister-in-law has read her Thomas Frank. And Uncle says:

Because you know Uncle: he’s stupid and drunk. But on this one issue, he’s surprisingly reasonable. Here he is in all his glory on Ferguson:

I guess I should be pleased that it wasn’t, “Those goddamned n*****s deserve to die!” But really, it’s still bad: totally predictable and lacking any empathy. Uncle is an authoritarian, who doesn’t even have reasonable things to say about The Hunger Games:

Translation: “I’m a bitter and hateful man!” But this isn’t me! I’ll admit, by the end of Thanksgiving, I’ll probably be modestly drunk. But that is much more likely to cause me to bring out the puppets than it is to even rant about how conservatives are destroying the nation. (Which they are.)

I think I understand why the uncle has become associated with the bigoted conservative who annoys everyone at family gatherings. First, the person who does this is almost always a man. Second, it probably isn’t your father or your brother. That’s not to say that they aren’t also bigoted conservatives. But you are used to them. They probably won’t say much because everyone knows what they think. Third, “uncle” has become a catchall for “that guy we don’t know very well.” So I’m not really offended.

But if you want to know how to deal with drunken uncles, my suggestion: deliver a puppet with every drink.

I don’t know if are aware of the H P Lovecraft short story “Cool Air.” In it, the narrator explains why it is he has an aversion to cold. He tells the story of meeting a doctor who lived upstairs from him. Through the use of a refrigeration system he has built and continues to build, he keeps his entire apartment extremely cold for unknown reasons. Eventually, the system breaks down and the narrator is forced to help the doctor stay cold with buckets of ice. But in the morning, after getting back with the replacement parts for the air conditioner, he finds the doctor in a hideous state of decomposition because he had actually been dead for 18 years, just keeping himself “alive” with his various chemical concoctions and the cool air.

I find the doctor’s plight very compelling. This constant effort to stave off death. It has a certain similarity to what a junkie does each day to stave off withdrawal. But it is also the way I feel right now with my work. I am producing stuff at an alarming rate. Although I complained recently that I felt like my work was becoming hackish, it is also undeniably true that it is becoming longer and deeper. And to some extent, I see it as an effort to avoid thinking about my life.

The only reason I’m even aware of this is that when I exercise, I am left to my own thoughts. I’ve noticed that the speed that I run is determined by exactly how disturbed I am about whatever it is I am thinking about at a given moment. Much of it is quite trivial. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, it is all trivial. I’ve even begun to wonder if all the conservatives are right when they talk about the poor — but not about the poor generally. When John Boehner says the poor don’t want to work, he’s kind of right about me. The truth is that I am not interested in doing yet more work that gets destroyed by the money men. And that is the more pleasant and high paying work. I am also not interested in getting a soul crushing job at the local gas station. All of it makes me think that we have a pretty screwed up society when the vast majority of people do actually pointless work. Really, we should all be working on farms an hour a day and spending the rest of our time writing stories and trying to understand Galois theory.

So I suppress this kind of reflection on the practical matters of my life with mental strip mining. I read and write and read and write. It is an extremely selfish thing. I often think that since others are so interested in practical matters, it isn’t really necessary for me to do so. Isn’t it the case that everyone is expected to have a soul crushing job simply because everyone is expected to have a soul crushing job? Most people think the 40 hour work week was on those clay tablets Moses brought down off the mountain. Tenth commandment: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. And you shall not work more than 40 hours per week unless your employer payeth unto you one and a half time.” The truth is the 40 hour work week is relatively new. So why not a 30 hour work week? Or 20? Or 10? You’ve got to ask yourself why you work so much and why so many people now work on Christmas. We do it because we lack freedom — we lack the freedom that hunter-gathers had twenty thousand years ago.

At the same time, I fear all the excessive “unproductive” work that I do is the only thing that is keeping me from having a nervous break down. Or at least a break down of some kind. And maybe that’s what everyone is doing. The clerk at the gas station goes to work not just because he needs the money (I do understand the practical side of life) but because he’s afraid that if he doesn’t keep working, he may find himself dead. Actually: more than dead. He may find that he died 18 years ago.