The Way of the Intercepting Mouth

A fool's lips walk into a fight, and his mouth invites a beating. – Proverbs 18:6

A fool’s lips walk in to a bar.  The bartender says, “We don’t offer lip service here.”

The only time I have been in any real trouble with the law was a result of growing up in the wrong part of the country among polite and civil people at the wrong time in the previous century.  I was forced to settle a few disagreements with physical force.   I avoided the use of violence on numerous occasions because I made it clear that I could and would accommodate anyone who wanted to take our disagreement up a notch.  By the end of my freshman year in high school, I had come to the eye-opening and occasionally eye-blacking realization that most people are not looking for an opponent but a victim.    

People who do not understand the role and purpose of physical force do not understand human nature.  My parents – my mother in particular – whipped me whenever it seemed necessary.  Being a sensible child, in my own way, I recall only a couple of time where our discussions became really serious.  Once she used a solid, seasoned oak 1-by-4 – and that was not the modern ”1x4” that’s really a quarter-inch short each way.  Nor was it smooth and well-planed.  Nor was it light, high-velocity pine.  It was heavy, hard, and rough.  And frankly I do not recall her being too particular in her aim, but I am pretty sure that was the last time she had to beat me. 

Mom was not above offering lessons to others.  My dad, being the youngest of a large family, had some nephews and nieces that were his age and older.   One such nephew lived up around the bend about a quarter-mile and his kids were about the same age as my older siblings.  They all walked to the one-room school together.  One day, after some school function, which the parents attended, Dad and Mom, the nephew and his wife, and all the kids were walking back across the field.  The nephew’s wife, J., said something derogatory about one of my sisters or my brother.  Mom said nothing, but Dad observed her lips pressed into a familiar thin, straight line across her face.  Probably because he was a wise and forward-thinking husband and/or didn’t want to eat burnt biscuits that night, Dad said to Mom, “You don’t have to take that.”  It was all the encouragement Mom needed as she wheeled on J. and laid her out flat.  A fool’s lips … 

In this day and age, Mom would have been hauled off to jail.  It would probably have been worse because I’m sorely afraid Mom would have resisted arrest.  “I think we’re gonna need a bigger Taser.”

The absence of consequences leads to a lack of order and discipline.  This is true for us personally – what would you eat if you had a pill that really kept you from gaining weight? – for the education system, for the economic and financial system, for government – for any human endeavor.  Distant and vague consequences never change behavior.  A wise person knows how to bring the future consequences into the present for himself or herself.  Being able to imagine the long-term destruction wrought by a vice or a bad habit can drag the future into the present and strengthen us in our struggle against it. 

I was a young fool, but I was blessed to be in a culture that was reluctant to suffer such.  I have no idea what will become of those who desperately needed their butts whipped as children or their noses bloodied as adolescents.  But there is another proverb that says, The way of the transgressor is hard.  We were a far more civilized nation when we all knew that a fool's lip could become a fat lip.  

(Note:  I think I owe this meditation to something Sultan Knish said, but I cannot find it, and it may have been someone else.)