“It’s not fair,” wails my youngest daughter. “She gets to have everything.” She points at her older sister. Her older sister is nearly twenty-two, has two jobs, and will soon be graduating from college with a degree in psychology. “Why can she have a car and I can’t?”
My youngest daughter is severely mentally ill. My wife and I think it’s probably not a good idea to allow someone who has broken most of the windows in her room and occasionally kicked holes in the wall to have control of a motor vehicle. Since her hospitalization a few months ago, she is mostly stable. She is also med-compliant (meaning she willing takes her medication and recognizes that she needs it; in fact, she will ask us for her pills if we happen to forget to give them to her.)
Nevertheless, my wife and I believe that the last thing other drivers in our small city need to face is a bipolar person that is still only marginally stable. So no, she can’t get a learner’s permit.
Yeah, France has nuclear weapons. And France is the equivalent of a normal, rational adult. We let rational adults have things that we don’t let insane teenagers, children or infants have. It’s okay if I have a carving knife so I can cut up an onion. A toddler? Not so much.
In the United States we debate gun control. The last couple of shootings have been done by people that apparently had mental illnesses. So we think that it probably would not be good to let people with serious mental illnesses legally purchase guns. Sort of like we don’t think that violent felons should be allowed to purchase such weapons, either.
I find it puzzling that many of the people who most want to restrict the sales of guns in the United States seem to think that it is okay for a nation like Iran to have access to weapons of mass destruction.
Iran is an insane teenager. And a convicted felon. Anyone who thinks they aren’t is as nutty as they are. Allowing them the bomb is about as rational as handing my youngest daughter an Uzi when she is screaming that she hates us, she just kicked a hole in the wall, and she yanked a knife from the knife drawer and is waving it in the air.
But shouldn’t we want to build trust? Give her a second chance? Show her that we recognize she is eighteen now?
The Iranians chant “death to America,” “death to Israel,” vow to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, sponsor terrorism, hold four Americans hostage, kill over a thousand American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously this means that we should now make a deal with them so they can continue their work on building nuclear bombs so they can add that to their arsenal of destruction. Let’s trust them, end the economic sanctions, let them have a hundred billion dollars, and just hope for the best. After all, when they see how nice we are they will of course stop doing bad things. And really, that death to America and Israel stuff—they can’t really mean that. Anyone who thinks they do just doesn’t understand that they are really rational actors and will behave rationally.
Starting today.
After all, rationality is why they keep women in burkas and execute gay people by hanging them from cranes. Because that’s what nice people do, right? And besides, who are we to talk: look at the bad things our police sometimes do to black people. (Because if I do anything wrong at all, then automatically you’re free to do any bad thing you like and who am I to criticize? If I got a parking ticket once, then I have no moral right to judge you for murdering that homeless man.)
Iran isn’t the only insane person in this house.
So our current president, several other world leaders and the UN that think this deal with Iran is a good thing? I think they’re criminally insane. And unlike my daughter, they’re not med-compliant.