At four years old I saw my first movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, from front row center at the Rialto theater in my hometown. Four years old and I believed every word, every character, every action. And from the top of my lungs I wailed when the witch arrived and talked. I screamed, cried. My brother and sister moved to the end seats. Cracker Jacks did not soothe. I believed the movie world, that witches hurt little girls.
A stubborn child, I would not go to movies for years after that. I read through Nancy Drew and into Little Women before I went to another movie. Why take a chance?
Eventually I read Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his discussion of the “willing suspension of disbelief,” our ability to enter frightening imaginary scenes, feel fear, then returned to our normal lives. Murder, mayhem, battles, aliens, life, anything can happen. We are entertained, it’s not real.
We live in the screens for long hours today. Americans spend 4 to 6 hours a day on their screen devices, Gen Z and millennials even more. Perhaps we too easily blur the lines between real and imagined. In ways small and large, we suspend our belief.
Much has been written about the worry that children lose the distinction between “playing war” and shooting their playmates. Adults? Well, they dress up with guns hanging on hips to protect from something. In the year 2025, 14,665 people were killed by guns (excluding suicides) in the United States.
Models with near perfect bodies display clothes that we buy for our less than perfect bodies.
A sleek automobile lounges on the lawn of the White House and we pay a hundred thousand dollars to park a heavily mortgaged Tesla in our heavily mortgaged driveway.
A charge card insists that “the more you spend, the more you save” when you use a card that gives 3% cashback (and charges 30% interest on unpaid balances).
A drive-in charges $2 for a small cup of coffee (served in cup made of Styrofoam, a product that will out-live every square inch of material in the car, the human, and the building). A pound of coffee produces enough coffee to fill a bathtub.
Oil, a non-renewable resource, should be pumped from the earth and windfarms closed down.
Darkly pigmented people from a small African country eat neighborhood pets and rob “us” of our resources.
Elections won by Democrats are “rigged” and “stolen.” Elections won Republicans are “landslides.”
Billionaires know how to save money. People on food stamps waste money.
A president who tells more than 54,000 lies or slanted statements in one administration is to be believed fully in the next.
We need to fund AI and defund human intelligence that needs food, housing, and schools.
Diversity is dangerous. We all need to look like straight men with Nordic golf playing ancestors.
I have been advised to watch what they do, not what they say. I think we must be careful with both, believe in our own minds. Think and know.
Earlier this week I happened on a program about Hamish Macbeth, a smalltown cop in a small Scottish town, whose sidekick is a Westie named Wee Jock. The two are happy in their work until one day Wee Jock is hit by a car and dies.
Hamish cannot bury him right away so cleans out his small refrigerator and places his sweet dog there until he can take him into the highland for burial. Eventually he does, builds a cairn over him, and places on top a flat stone into which he’s incised “Wee Jock.” His friend unfolds a bag pipe and asks what to play. Hamish says, “Play a sad song for Wee Jock.”
He does. The camera pulls back to show two men standing before the cairn in the twilight, then the piped sadness. My face awash with tears, I join their mourning for Wee Jock, for every dog who has been in my life, and for my friends’ Cooper who has just finished sixteen years of love and devotion before he had to leave.
Not witches to hurt small girls. Emotions to celebrate the best of life. As I have been advised and have advised others, “You have a brain. Use it.”