day no. 17,064: see something, say something

“Math will hurt their feelings, because math reminds everybody of the Last Judgment. The answer is right or wrong, and you can’t blow sunshine at it.” — Douglas Wilson, Keep Your Kids

The facts do not care about your feelings. Reality does not come with a "none of the above" option. It is a true or false question with one right answer. Experience is a rough teacher: it gives the test first and the lesson second. Those attempting to ignore reality must at some point deny all fixed realities because they follow you around and heckle you wherever you go. Up and down and right and wrong are constant reminders of the Reality hovering all too uncomfortably behind the realities.

"Think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Insanity is getting into a staring contest with reality and expecting it to blink. You can make believe that two and two make five, but you cannot make the extra unit ex nihilo. There is still only four in existence, even if you call it five. The only way to pay off the one you owe is to borrow it from another equation, but that would only create a deficit somewhere else. Math is ruthless and relentless in that way. The sums must square.

"Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer." — G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Yet, here we are in a world where some  outrageously insist that boys can get periods and that girls can have bulges and others even more outrageously insist that we must take the first people seriously, sometimes even at the threat of job loss.

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” — George Orwell, 1984

To be fair, reality can defend itself. It does not need us to hold it up. That said, it does not refuse its allies. When swords are drawn to fight over the greenness of grass, reality will outfit its defenders with sharp points while its attackers will be left to brandish dullness.

"We must stop being experts in only seeing these things in bits and pieces. We have to understand that it is one total entity opposed to the other total entity. It concerns truth in regard to final and total reality -- not just religious reality, but total reality. And our view of final reality -- whether it is material-energy, shape by impersonal chance, or the living God and Creator -- will determine our position, on every crucial issue we face today. It will determine our views on the value and dignity of people, the base for the kind of life the individual and society lives, the direction law will take, and whether there will be freedom or some form of authoritarian dominance." — Frances A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto, chapter 3: The Destruction of Freedom and Faith

A land that accepts reality may endure a few crazies, but a land that condemns realities must affirm them. Freedom is the ability to say what you see with your eyeballs. Wherever people are forbidden to speak about what everyone sees, a warped way of seeing the world is being enforced.