The Sheepdog's War

Found a link to this post at Confederate Yankee which contains the text of an e-mail sent to him. Very much worth reading. Deals with sheep, wolves and sheepdogs, and the differences between.

I'll add in something about the sheepdogs; when possible, they try to give some of the sheep fangs and claws. They may not shift to sheepdogs, but they are much less likely to become a victim.

I've dealt with people who flatly choose to be sheep; and some who decide to become, if not sheepdogs, one of Churchill's 'well-armed sheep'. The former are just about hopeless; the latter decide that they'd rather be armed and a little spooked by it than be unarmed and scared. I mentioned a couple of posts back that I've been teaching a friend to shoot. She's not interested at this time in sport shooting; she's interested in protecting herself. One of the things I've worked on with her is pointing out that if it comes to worst case, she's got to be able to look down that gun barrel at another human and pull the trigger. As many times as it takes.

I guess that's one of the big dividing lines; the line between those who say they could never hurt another person, and those who face the possibility and say "If I have to, I can". For the first group there are no goblins or orcs or vile wastes of oxygen that need fighting(although they often seem to see the President as such) because 'violence is always bad' and so forth; the second group generally hates the idea of hurting others, but will do it if need be. It's not a pleasant thought, there's nothing 'adventurous' or noble about it, it's just what has to be done.

I've (happily) never been in the roothog-or-die situation, I don't know if I'd qualify as a low-level sheepdog or just a feral sheep who knows the wolves are there and grew horns. I do know that when a friend once expressed horror that I'd taught my daughter and son to shoot, and do anything else necessary to protect themselves, she was horrified. She's one of the peace-at-any-price people. I want my kids to be sheepdogs.

Tough ones. With big fangs.