Word Games

William Raspberry, addressing the First Amendment, tells us:

"There's nothing in common sense - and certainly nothing in the First Amendment - that requires government hostility to publicly expressed religion, which is where the requirement that government be 'secular' takes you," he says. "I think it's better to say 'temporal' rather than secular. Temporal means the here and now, without reference to the hereafter. Our government was designed to be temporal, but you have only to look at the words and actions of the Founders to understand that they had no interest in the sort of secularity the court now seeks to enforce."

But it's not just in impossibly arcane Supreme Court decisions that "secular" plays us false, says Hasson. "It gets us in needless trouble internationally as well. The Arabic word for secular is almehni, meaning godless. So when Muslim fundamentalists hear us talk about secular government, they think we mean, quite literally, a godless government. Temporal translates into another Arabic word entirely, dunyawi, or worldly.

Hasson is not just playing word games.

Well, yes. He is.

Take for example somebody who argued that the Elbonian word for "Godly" is "ignorant". While it is fair to respond that the Elbonians, a fictional ethnicity featured in Dilbert cartoons, are famous for their ability to get pretty much everything wrong, the better response would be to point out that if "ignorant" is the best word in the Elbonian language to describe the concept of Godliness, the Elbonians in fact have no word for Godliness. Further, as we are not applying the inaccurate Elbonian definition of Godliness within our nation - we use the English language, after all - the deficits of the Elbonian language have no relevance to our domestic debates.

If I were to add to this that the Elbonians translate the word "Cotton Candy" as "Worldly", you would probably find it ridiculous if I were to suggest that we call our government a "Cotton Candy government" in order to convey a more accurate meaning to the Elbonians. "But," you would assert, "Cotton candy in English means 'a candy made by spinning sugar that has been boiled to a high temperature'." And you would be right. While "temporal" is a closer match to "worldly" than is "cotton candy", it still carries a different meaning (particularly in its most common uses) than worldly.

This ultimately raises some questions for Mr. Hasson: What is the Arabic word for "worldly"? Because if it is something other than "dunyawi", which you say means "worldly", we're engaging in some pretty peculiar contortions. And if "worldly" (which you suggest to be a word which properly conveys the nature of our government to other cultures) translates to "dunyawi", why do you prefer the term "temporal" to the term "wordly"? Perhaps, to confuse the English language debate?

Kids in Cuffs

William Raspberry takes on the question of a handcuffed five-year-old, but from a different perspective.

It's funny how the videotapes have divided us. Some of us saw the footage of the 5-year-old girl gone berserk in her St. Petersburg, Fla., classroom and decided we'd been too harsh in our judgment of the school officials for calling the police. Others saw the cops handcuffing the tiny child and decided it was the grown-ups who had gone nuts.

I look at the tape and tremble for fear that I'm looking at a fledgling outlaw whose path, if uninterrupted, could land her in jail -- or worse. And it can't be a 5-year-old's fault.

And yes, if you talk to elementary school teachers, you will learn that those on track to do time in jail or prison are usually identified at a very early age. But efforts to formalize the identification, channel the kids or their families into counseling programs, or to otherwise provide the type of support and intervention necessary to prevent that outcome are typically rejected as too costly or too controvercial. Or both.

I'm not ascribing any particular brilliance or insight to teachers. It is just that they happen to be exposed to their students (and their student's behaviors and attitudes) on a daily basis for the majority of the year. If you think about people you knew who dropped out of school, or ended up in jail or prison, how old were they when you first recognized that something was wrong?

Of course, there's another problem with intervention - with the minimal resources we have put into this issue, even if we correctly identify the kids we seemingly have no knowledge of what type of intervention will be helpful, and what type will be counter-productive. Despite the pouring millions upon millions of dollars into our nation's child welfare systems, there seems to be a general disinterest in finding out what actually works. I guess, as opposed to finding and implementing what is likely to work, it's bureaucratically easier to set specific hurdles in front of parents - parenting skills classes, anger management classes, periodic home inspections, drug and alcohol testing - to see who trips, with "foster care" as the "solution" when the parents are deemed inadequate.