I hate sticky traps. But sometimes, there’s no recourse, not when the rodent hides in crannies where the cats can’t follow, and in spaces where it’s impossible to place “humane” or regular traps.  But sticky traps create another problem – and that’s what to do with a living creature that looks at you with fearful eyes.  Despite having seen the damage mice can do when uncontrolled, I still hate having to dispose of them.  But it takes days to clean and sterilize the mess even one mouse can leave… and, like other creatures that sample domestic comfort, mice that are released have this tendency to return.  So I have a simple rule with various pests – stay out of the house, and I’ll leave you alone.

In the aftermath of the rodent, however, I was reading a commentary by a reviewer on “ethics” and whether characters by various authors lack ethics when they kill without showing remorse and angst, even when those they kill are people who, by any reasonable standard, are truly evil.  Since some of my characters have been charged, upon occasion, with such behavior, I couldn’t help thinking about the issue.

What it seems to me is that the issue for all too many people is either whether the “killer” feels sorry or concerned about his acts or whether the acts take place in a setting where the one doing the killing has “no choice.”  And over the years, I’ve realized that, for many, many, readers, the ones who are dispassionate or don’t feel “bad,” regardless of the impact of their actions, are generally considered as bad guys, or antiheroes at best, as in the case of Dirty Harry or others, while the good guys are the ones who reluctantly do what must be done.  If a protagonist doesn’t show reluctance… well, then he or she is either a villain, soulless, or an anti-hero without true ethics.  Part of this attitude obviously stems from a societal concern about individuals without social restraints – the sociopaths and the psychopaths – but is it truly unethical [and I’m not talking about illegal, which is an entirely different question, because all too often application of the law itself can be anything but ethical] to kill an evil person without feeling remorse?  And does such a killing make the protagonist unethical?

How can it be more “ethical” to slaughter other soldiers in a battle, other soldiers whose greatest fault may well be that they were on the “other side,” than to quietly dispose of an evil person on a city side street?  Well… one argument is that the soldiers were ordered to kill, and no one authorized the disposal of the evil individual.  By that reasoning, Nazi death camp guards were acting ethically.  Yet… we don’t want individuals taking the law into their own hands.  On the other hand, what can individuals do in such a circumstance when the law offers no protection?

These are all issues with which we as writers, and as citizens, must wrestle, but what bothers me is the idea that, for some people and some readers, the degree of ethics rests on the “feelings” of the individual who must face the decision of when to use force and to what degree.  Was I any more or any less ethical in killing the rodent vandalizing my kitchen because I felt sorry for the little beast?  It didn’t stop me from putting an end to him.  Isn’t the same true in dealing with human rodents?

And don’t tell me that people are somehow “different”?  With each passing year, research shows that almost all of the traits once cited as distinguishing humans as unique also exist in other species.  Ravens and crows, as well as the higher primates, use tools and have what the theorists call a “theory of mind.”  The plain fact is that every species kills something, whether for food, self-defense, territory, or other reasons.

So…perhaps a little less emphasis is warranted on whether the feelings about the act of killing determine whether the killing is “ethical” or not.  Admittedly, those characters who show reluctance are certainly more sympathetic… but, really, should they be?  Or should they be evaluated more on the reasons for and the circumstances behind their acts?

At the end of the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the protagonist says something like, “Insanity is doing the same thing time after time and expecting a different result.  All of us are insane at times, but what happens when more and more of us are insane at the same time?”

Recent off-year city council elections here in Cedar City reminded me of this rather forcefully.  Two of the candidates running for re-election were incumbents, and both were handily defeated – and replaced by candidates with exactly the same backgrounds, views, and general attitudes of the incumbents – and those new councilmen have absolutely no experience in municipal government. As I noted more than a year ago, the voters of Utah did essentially the same thing in replacing the then-incumbent ulrea-conservative Republican Senator with an ultra-conservative clone.  In a national politics generally, the Democrats continue to reinforce their ideology and the Republicans theirs, and in general each party is continuing to do the same thing they’ve always done with the hope of a different result.

And that different result isn’t going to happen, because increased taxes [the Democratic view]can’t cover the annual deficit, let alone the debt ; and there’s no way to cut federal programs and regulations [the Republican view] to the degree necessary to reduce massive deficits without destroying both government and the economy.  But both sides resist compromise, and continue to do the same thing… and that is truly insanity, and no one is calling them on it.

From what I can see, this is exactly what’s happening politically in the United States, and perhaps elsewhere around the world as well.

Have we reached the point in society where our illusions mean more to us than the survival of our society?  Where ideological “purity” is all, and practical compromise is a dirty filthy thing not to be mentioned anywhere?

Well… certainly various forms of purity have run rampant before, such as the Nazi effort for racial purity, the endless wars/massacres over religious/ethnic/political purity, ranging from those that plagued Europe for some 500 years, to the Chinese and Russian revolutions, to Pol Pot in Cambodia, to even the Mountain Meadows massacre in Utah.  And somehow, after all the fighting was over, and the hundreds of millions of dead bodies buried or ignored, there were still two sides left, two views conflicting, if temporarily more quietly.  Protestantism and Catholicism still exist in Europe, Ireland, and the British Isles.  The Mormon Church remains predominant in Utah, but it’s far from exclusive, and non-Mormons outnumber Mormons in Salt Lake City itself. Both China and Russia have had to come to terms with capitalism, and right wing racial hate groups still exist, if in far smaller numbers, across Europe.

Perhaps… it just might be well to recall that when “ideals” ignore reality, they all too easily become illusions.  Yet, without ideals… everything is sold to the most powerful or wealthiest.  And balancing ideals with reality is also a compromise… like life.

Insanity is not only doing the same thing time and time again and expecting the same result; it’s also failing to recognize that inflexible adherence to any ideal inevitably leads to unrest, disruption, and all too often… death and destruction… all the time while each set of true believers claims that everything would be fine – if only the other side would realize the error of their ways.

Some ten years ago, I attended a memorial service for a woman who had died from a heart attack – the last of a series over a year or so.  The church was filled to overflowing, and everyone had wonderful things to say about her.  She was excellent technically in the position she held, and, as a single woman, she had even fostered a wayward teen girl and tried to set her – and her daughter – on the path to a more productive life.  She worked hard and long at her job, and she was helpful to her colleagues. But she had one fault. She wasn’t averse to pointing out when she was given a stupid or non-productive assignment, and, worse, she was almost invariably accurate in her assessments.

The result?  Her superiors piled more and more work on her while effectively cutting her pay and status, and because she was in her late fifties or early sixties trying to support herself and two others, she had little choice but to keep working.  For whatever reason, the one colleague with whom she worked well had her job abolished – only to have it reinstated a year or so later and filled by a man [who didn’t last all that long, either].  Employees in other departments who tried to be advocates for her were either ignored or told that it was none of their business… and, besides, she brought it on herself because of her sharp tongue. After her first heart attack, as soon as she could, she went back to work because her position wasn’t covered by short-term disability insurance, and she was too young for Social Security.  She died, of course, some months later, after she’d lost her house and was living in a trailer.

Just another sad story, another one of the countless tales of people who have run afoul of adversity after adversity. Except… a goodly portion of those people who had offered tributes at her memorial service were the very people who had effectively undercut her and driven her to her death.

They praised her talents, but hated her honesty.  They praised her charity toward others, while practicing little toward her.  And, in the end, after the memorial service was over, she was quietly forgotten, and the once-wayward teen moved out of town, and life went on for the men who had driven an honest, if acerbic, woman to death.

Why do I remember these events?  Because, in reflecting on one woman’s death, I see them played out on a larger and larger scale, day after day, when the voices of honesty and reason are drowned in a sea of rhetoric, often quietly fomented by those who created so many of today’s major problems, especially the politicians and the financial community.  At the same time, no one with the power to resolve the situation wants to or to recognize the embarrassing facts about their part in creating the current problems… even while romanticizing the acts and deeds of deceased politicians with whom they often disagreed while paying lip service to hard-working Americans whose real wages have declined over the past decade.

But then, maybe calling the acts of the perpetrators and their subsequent rhetoric mere hypocrisy is too generous.

Tolerance of the unjust, the unequal, and the discriminatory is anything but a virtue, nor is fiction that brings to light such problems in society a vice.  Yet among some readers and reviewers there seems to be a dislike of work that touches upon such issues. Some have even gone so far as to suggest such fiction, in portraying accurately patterns of intolerance, inequality, and gender discrimination that such fiction, actually reinforces support of such behaviors.  Over the past few years, I’ve seen reviews and comments about my fiction and that of other writers denigrated because we’ve portrayed patterns of discrimination, either on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.  I certainly hope what I’ve seen are isolated incidences, but even if they are isolated incidences, I find them troubling, especially when readers or reviewers complain that illustrating in fiction what occurred either historically or continues to occur in present-day society constitutes some form of discrimination and showing how it operates is hateful and insulting.

Discrimination is hateful, insulting, and degrading, but pretending it doesn’t exist while preaching tolerance is merely a more tasteful way of discriminating while pretending not to do so… and that’s not only a form of discrimination, but also a form of hypocrisy. It somehow reminds me of those Victorians who exalted the noble virtues of family and morality and who avoided reading “unpleasant” books, while their “upstanding” life-style was supported at least in part by child-labor, union-breaking tactics that including brutality and firearms, and sweat-shop labor in which young women were grossly underpaid.

Are such conditions better than they were a century ago?  Of course they are – in the United States and much of the developed world.  But gender/sexual discrimination still exists even here – it’s just far more subtle – and it remains rampant in much of the developing and third world.  So… for a writer to bring up such issues, whether in historical or fantasy or futuristic science fiction is scarcely unrealistic, nor is it “preaching” anything.  To this day, Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country is often violently criticized – if seldom in “respectable” print, but often in male-oriented discussion – because it postulates a quietly feministically-dominated future society and portrays men as dominated by excessive aggression and sexual conquest, yet a huge percentage of fantasy has in fact historically portrayed men almost “heroically” in such a light. Why the criticism of writers such as Tepper?  Might it just be that too many readers, largely male, don’t like reading and seeing historically accurate patterns of sexual discrimination reversed?  And how much easier it is to complain about Tepper and others than to consider the past and present in our world today.

There’s an old saying about what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander…

A week or so ago, my trusty and ancient writing computer bit the dust, and I replaced it with a brand-new version, equipped with the latest version of Word.  After a fair amount of muttered expletives, I managed to figure out the peculiarities of the latest word processing miracle from Microsoft, or at least enough to do what I do.  Then I discovered that every time I closed the program, the new defaults for page setup and font that I’d established vanished when I opened the program.  My local techs couldn’t figure out why, but they did give me a support number for Microsoft.  The first tech was cheerful, and when we quickly established that I’d been doing all the right things, and she couldn’t figure it out either, she referred me to another tech.  In less than five minutes, he’d guided me through things and solved the problem – and it wasn’t my fault, but that of a piece of software installed by the computer manufacturer.  Word now retains my defaults, and we won’t talk about some of the other aspects of the program [since I’ve dwelt on those before].

All that brings me to the next incredible discovery – and that’s the blundering idiocy known as a grammar checker.  Unfortunately, the Microsoft people didn’t retain a wonderful feature of my old Word 7.0 – the separation of the spell-check and grammar features.  So… if I want to spell-check a document – which I do, because my typing is far from perfect – I must endure a grammar check.  Now… I wouldn’t mind an accurate grammar check, but what passes for a grammar check is an abomination for anyone who writes sentences more complex than subject-verb-object, and especially someone who likes a certain complexity in his prose. The truly stupid program [or programmers who wrote it] cannot distinguish between the subject in the main sentence and the subject in an embedded subordinate clause, and if one is plural and the other singular, it insists that the verb in the subordinate clause be changed to match the subject in the main sentence.

[It also doesn’t recognize the subjunctive, but even most copy-editors ignore that, so I can’t complain about that in a mere program.]  There are also a number of other less glaring glitches, but I’m not about to enumerate them all.

For me, all this isn’t a problem, although it’s truly an annoyance. But for all those students learning to write on computers it is a problem, especially since most of them have absolutely no idea about the basics of grammar, let alone about how to write correct complex sentences – and now we have a computer grammar-checking program that can only make the situation worse!

There are definitely times when “helpful” technology is anything but, and this definitely qualifies as such.