As a general rule, I do not date many of the things I do. My letters are un-dated. My notes are uncluttered with time. My days and nights are distinguished only if I bother to look out the window. Putting a date on these essays is not something I do. In fact, I avoid all but inadvertent reference to contemporaneous events as I worry the little knots in these essays that tie the pieces of my curiosity to my passing moments of anger and angst.

Today, I cannot avoid the contemporaneous aspect of self-labeled "Progressive and Liberal" crank heads. It is a comment on today. On our People of today. On the Children who compose the main body and mind of our society in our America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave (and the Insane, by the standards of our Founders).

In an article at boston.com, a public school teacher named "Doug Van Gorder" is said to suggest that school lockdowns during physical emergencies, emergencies like someone seizing a moment to eliminate staff and students, is probably a good thing, but maybe not. Not? Why "not"?

Because Doug quite accurately suggests that the lockdown guarantees a virtually unlimited number of potential dead staff and students, limited only by time and ammunition (or blade sharpness, or bludgeon sturdiness. There are lots of ways to kill defenseless people).

Defenseless and locked-in is almost uniformly assured because a parallel policy of campus life is to prohibit weapons for defense as well as to spoil the right of ownership of "ugly things" with a potential for unauthorized mayhem.

Like fish in a barrel, but wait . . . I'll get to that allusion in a moment.

Doug goes on to comment that lockdown may not be as great an idea as it first appears to a truly enlightened Progressive, exactly because it "holds everyone in place, allowing a shooter easily to find victims." He then suggests that the next best alternate is to publicly announce an emergency and command that all within hearing must urgently flee the campus for fear of the danger therein resident.

But ol' Doug doesn't like that idea, either.

Why? "Why?" you ask? Why, because it would not be fair for the quick and agile and self-reliant to succeed in avoiding the fate of the weak, the slow, the indecisive and those deferential to authority and therefore looking for someone in authority to further advise their prospective escape.

Doug is quoted here: "Schools should level playing fields, not intrinsically reward those more resourceful. A level barrel is fair to all fish."

See what I mean about alluding to "fish in barrels"? As in "Shooting fish in a barrel."? He's saying that it is not "Fair" to warn people of danger and to flee from danger, because it is not "Fair" that some people are fast and some people are slow. Good Government is accomplished by making us all die at the same rate and the same time, is it, Doug?

Oh, you think I am taking poor Doug out of context? Well, let's see what he says in closing his comments, shall we?

Here goes: "But as a progressive, I would sooner lay my child to rest than succumb to the belief that the use of a gun for self-defense is somehow not in itself a gun crime."

Self-defense a crime? Is that Progressive and Liberal? Is that the mental Hell that the original progressive liberal assertion of inherent individual Rights, Liberty, Self Determination has harvested from 223 years of Independence from submission of the individual to whims of rulers?

Sequestering a class of people to slaughter because it is "Fair"? No, that was not a grammatical screw-up. What difference is it to free Men and Women, if their "Government"establishes a "Policy" which assures the destruction of the population of a classroom or a social, political, economic or religious class?

Why stop on our shores? Why not eliminate classes of other populations who (bless their little ignorant souls), (if they have souls), believe that their lands and their lives and their money are their own, and not ours.

Well, it is because we say it is in our "National Interest" to take their stuff. Why? "Because we say so." It is our policy. Because it is "Fair". Why is that? Well, like shooting fish in a barrel, it is policy and it is fair, because we say so.

I think that any time any adult commands me to do as they say, "Because I say so!", I am in the company of a mortal enemy who has just declared his intention to destroy me. Coincidentally, I am not an advocate of Doug's view of self-defense.

Call me silly perhaps, but I am not insane.