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.)
