Once a tragedy has occurred, people who are so inclined have the perfect opportunity to tell other people what to do with their lives. Here's an example: In Canada last year a boy wrote a short story called "Twisted" about a bullied boy who blows up his school. He was suspended. Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, two Canadian authors of excellent reputation for The Handmaid's Tale and The English Patient respectively, came to the boy's defense. We don't know the boy's name not because I'm lazy but because the Canadian press doesn't report the names of troubled youths. At a rally called "Artists for Freedom of Speech," Atwood gave the boy a copy of "First Words" a collection of early writings by famous folk like Gore Vidal and Michael Crichton. Somewhere behind the boy's crowd of supporters some students protested, identifying themselves as "The Voice of Reason." That's the debate, of course. Emotion versus reason and freedom versus security, the same debate we've always had.

Whenever there's a shooting in a public school (now that's an introductory clause that shouldn't make sense but does) I start to worry that folk on the left and right are going to use grief and fear to drive their agendas. If both extremists had their ways, we'd have censorship in the entertainment and media industries, tightly controlled public school reading lists and would probably all be taking Prozac or something to keep us calm and docile all day long. All right, that will never happen because America is great at moderating extreme ideas. But when extreme events occur there's always a chance that an extreme solution or two will slip by -- surely not enough to bring 1984 to life and probably not anything that won't get struck down by some court, but the danger is there.

I realized during the Presidential race that Joe Lieberman and Jesse Helms probably share more feelings about film content and what should be done about it with each other than either of them share with me. You see, I liked The Matrix and I even find screen violence to be, if not cathartic, at least a good way for my darker angels to escape my psyche for play time. I'm not even obsessed with screen violence (I have no plans for seeing Hannibal) mostly I watch Woody Allen movies and those are light on violence, light on sex, and light on special effects. Mostly, people just talk.

Of course, people on both the left and right went through a period of hating woody Allen when his personal life was thrust into the public's face by the New York City and then national press. What I have believed for a long time is that the United States is a puritan country and that the typical Republican and typical Democrat would typically censor expression or limit freedoms to a great degree if the Constitution wasn't such a pesky opponent. The left worries that vulnerable people are warped by images in the media, which they believe is dominated by fierce corporations. The right believes that many of the images portrayed by the media are morally wrong, and that the media might be owned by fierce corporations (who the right wingers like) but that heathen folk calling themselves artists are the ones creating the contemptible content.

Do you want to watch violent movies or have your kid safe from getting shot at school? The only sane answer to the question is "safe kid" and that means people who oppose movie content control have to say, "safe kid, but I don't think (censoring movies) will actually make my kid safe..." and it's hard to make a strong argument if you have to start off saying "yes, but..."

On The Today Show I saw a high school principal who fancied himself an expert on adolescent psychology. He would have also suspended the Canadian boy, I gather. "That's not freedom of speech," he said. "Freedom of speech ends when you threaten to kill me." Threats, he remarked, are "pathology and we have to take the P-A-T-H out of pathology and find a path to... yadda yadda yadda."

All us humans have violent fantasies from time to time. Sometimes the expression of those feelings is pathological but sometimes it isn't. Of course, we must not hurt each other. But that doesn't mean we should always repress our feelings. There are no easy answers to the human condition and every undesirable thought is not a pathology.

Michael Maiello often indulges in that violent workplace fantasy where terrorists break in and take hostages and HE, armed with a graphing calculator and a telephone chord, saves everyone.