In the place of shame you have substituted a meaningless phrase, “Paying one’s debt to society.” You send a rapist or murderer to prison for a few years, and then you say he has “paid his debt to society.” Of course, he has done no such thing. A term in prison pays for nothing, not if it is for ten years or twenty or fifty! The victim or victims are still violated or dead, and to say that the evildoer has paid his debt is to denigrate the value of the victim! This, in turn, causes anger among the victim’s family or friends, who wonder why a beloved wife is worth five years while someone else’s daughter is worth twice that. This, in turn, causes disrespect for the law. As Canthorel has written, “If the law does not do justice, the people will mock the law.”
Vess is astonished that Earthians define as cruel and unusual many acts that are not unusual and not particularly cruel. Breeding madness is cruel, breeding madness is unusual. Most of your men don’t have it. Most of your men wouldn’t want it. Castration would remove it from those who have it. What is cruel about that? Is the inceptive organ really more important than the mind? Vess and I find this an extremely exotic notion. In your great documents of national purpose, the right to pursue satisfactions in one’s own life is asserted, but not at others’ expense. People who misuse the lives of others should not be allowed to repeat the act, but your peculiar ideas about cruelty allow it, time and again.
One of the programs we left to start without us, back on Earth, is the rewording of your newspapers and TV shows. They will no longer be able to use empty language, like “paid his debt to society,” or “claimed responsibility” for an act of terrorism. Instead, they must use true words. “He has been sentenced to prison for ten years which will do nothing to ameliorate his urges to molest and mutilate little girls.” Or, “The XX faction has asserted that it committed the cowardly atrocity of killing a busload of schoolchildren.” Earthians must learn to saytruly what has happened and not cover it with easy-speak.
Earthians, or perhaps only Americans, must also realize that some persons cannot be fixed, that nurture can go only so far in changing what people are born to be. Some people are born dangerous. We have a saying, we Pistach: “Some pfiggi can’t breed, some pfluggi can’t bite, some flosti can’t fly, some Pistach are glusi.” Pfiggi are small and numerous, Pfluggi are larger and have sharp teeth. Both live in swamps. In essence, the saying means that we must accept the reality of persons, not what they should be or we wish they were, but what they are. Someone may be born of humans and look like a human without having humanity. Someone may be born of kind parents and raised with kindness and be unkind, just as someone may be born crippled or dwarfed to people who are neither. The biological body may not manifest the psychological quality of humanity, and if it does not, it is not human. We Pistach know what it takes to mend people, and it takes a good deal more than you are willing to do.
Vess and I will also talk about your reproductive habits. Your people have learned a great deal about the subject, but you have applied little sense to it, even yet. Now you are begetting children scientifically, and great law courts grind to stillness on the issues of who owns the resultant child. Is it the donor of sperm or the donor of egg,- is it the womb that bears, the person who paid, the doctor who was instrumental, the legal wife of the sperm donor, the legal husband of the egg donor, the legal husband of the womb, the legitimate previous children of the womb, the mate of the person who paid, the person who signed the contract?
We have another saying, “Those who cause, pay.” It is a simple rule, but it has been very, very effective in bringing order to our lives. If a physician helps a woman bear eight children at once, then that doctor must support seven of them! If your congressmen will not vote to control guns, if your NRA fights against gun control, then your congressmen and the members of the NRA must individually help pay for medical care and wrongful deaths and funeral expenses for every accidental shooting death. We will figure out a way to do this. Vess and I have had several good ideas.