I couldn't find a specific news link about the Julie Amero case neutral enough for me to feel comfortable posting, but do look around and see what's going on.

I feel disgusted at such a flagrant display of skewed "moral" priorities taking the place of law and justice. I admit that I only know as much about the case as I have been able to glean from various news sources, but what I've seen leads me to perceive the situation as a blatant example of bad judgment. If we give Amero the benefit of the doubt, then she may well have to spend 40 years (essentially the rest of her life) in prison on account of pop-up windows in Internet Explorer. If we assume that she is guilty and showed these sites to her class on purpose, then she may well have to spend 40 years in prison (a sentence four times as long as the state minimum for a rape conviction) for inappropriately showing 13-year-olds pictures of naked people, a sight which the majority of them have most likely seen anyway.

The case of Julie Amero brings up again for me a major problem with the country in which I live. Americans as a whole see sex and nudity to be far more shameful and wrong than violence. The logic of that perception escapes me completely. The rallying cry "We must protect the children" rings false to me when protection involves censoring naked bodies instead of mutilated bodies. The concern, as I understand it, is to keep children from emulating what they see. Why, then, is a naked body worse to see than crowds of people getting bludgeoned and shot and eviscerated? If I were to raise a child, I would infinitely prefer that my child strip down and get naked than start whaling on or kill someone else.

It's late and I'm out of steam. Maybe I'll follow up on this in the morning.

Is this what it really means to be an adult?

The Christmas season has been wonderful, but quite exhausting. I've been running around for the past week and a half going to various family events and church and out of town and back into town and only just now do I have a chance to sit back and breathe, having just driven Laura back up to St. Olaf. There's actually snow up here, and a bite to the air that provides a calming reminder that winter does, in fact, exist and should occur during this general period of time.

For Christmas, Laura gave me this collection of poetry by Jill Scott, which I'd asked for to help with the tutorial I'm trying to set up for next fall (an analysis of 20th century song lyrics as poetry). I have since fallen in love with Scott's words, and the book along with some holiday stress prompted me to start writing poetry again–– for which I am very, very grateful. Not only am I happy to be writing again, but the material I'm producing feels much more satisfactory than earlier work.