Who's the Real Monster?

Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me?

--The Creature, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Just finished reading my Halloween book, Frankenstein. I mean to have it finished in October, but instead my blood-curtled far into Thanksgiving season. I hadn't read it before, but generally love gothic fiction, and this was no exception.

It strikes me as interesting though that most people think Frankenstein is the name of the monster in the book, and as far as movie monsters go, "Frankenstein" has always seemed to me kind of lame (maybe why I hadn't read this book yet), just a bumbling, sappy, Eyore-type figure, with nowhere near the potential to scare that Dracula possessed. Frankenstein is actually the name of the doctor who creates the creature, and he's not a mad scientist, he's really kind of like you or me. Frankenstein, blinded by his desire for "achievement", creates a being with physical and intellectual capacities, but then forgets about him, without ever fostering virtues in him. The creature is left to form his own estimation of virtue, and being without companionship, devoid of community in a world where no one looks like him, he turns on his creator after Frankenstein refuses to make him a companion.

The book is really about (in my estimation) our ability to perversely delude ourselves. I kept thinking about the "monsters" of our society, the modern-day criminal, and how we react to the actions of those who terrorize, murder and often look physically different from us. What if, instead of seeing these people as monsters, we were able to recognize our own part of the responsibility each time a crime was committed? What we felt the pain of having failed this person and our community in our complacency towards the virtue-formation of others? What if, being aware that the communities and societies we live in are fundamentally our "creators", we were convicted by each conviction of a crime to pour our resources into rehabilitation, education and the fostering of virtue in those WE are responsible for?

I'm not against holding people accountable for their actions. In fact, I'm just suggesting that in actuality we fail to do that. While it couldn't be the place of the "justice" system to somehow convict the societies themselves that crimes emerge within, maybe we could pay more attention to the ways in which we create the "monsters" in our midsts. In Missouri the juvenile delinquency system is rehabilitative, and the ACLU recently posted a blog about it in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Love it.

Sweet, Sweet Conversation

Today I finally listened to this podcast from last week of the Diane Rehm Show, featuring bluegrass (or old-time mountain music) legend Ralph Stanley. Listen to it twice: first for the great content and stories from a serious music legend, and second for the aural experience of hearing radio's most beautiful voice in conversation with the gnarled, slow voice that to me epitomizes Appalachia. What disease and age have done to the vocal apparatuses of Rehm and Stanely respectively is remarkable, and left me with a feeling of equanimity towards all life's "constant sorrows," disease and age included.

WELCOME

Welcome, friends, to my new blog!

I've been blogging for over 5 years now (since 2004), but when I first started blogging, there were very few of the features there are for bloggers today (or at least very few accessible), so over the years of the blogging boom, my former blog had lost a bit of its coherence. I wasn't sure how to use it, nor when I got an idea did I know how to implement it. So I usually used it like a teenage girl uses her diary: gushing about my latest experiences, lampooning my enemies and forgetting about it for weeks at a time while she is distracted with other things.

Hopefully, with a new blog, I can create something more blogger-friendly and reader-friendly. At this germinal stage I'm sure I'll still be figuring out how that looks, so bear with me, but know I'm not just writing for me anymore. I hope to include pictures and updates more frequently. I'm sure I'll also write about theology and current events. I'm inspired by the great bloggers in my life (Lainey, Kate, Perez... okay, not Perez).

So I hope you will join me: I'm hoping by making my blog a more blogger- and reader-friendly "space" that it will actually be more hospitable and inviting. So pull up a chair, grab your hot cocoa, and meet me in the blogosphere. You're all invited (at least until 2014, when blogs will have been replaced by 3D vlogs and I'll be in my 30s so probably more focused on my hair regrowth treatments).