Our Fear of the Real

I hear that Congress, soft of hand and brain, will consider removing the immemorial exemption of women from conscription into combat.  Since we are utterly dysfunctional at everything having to do with men, women, marriage, family-making, and the raising and teaching of boys and girls these days, I suppose I should have foreseen this latest madness. I am not going to get into the physics of it, what makes a sixteen-year-old boy far too much for his mother to handle -- the same mother who is now supposed to charge a hill with eighty pounds on her back and meet some grown man coming at her with full force and killing in his heart.  Instead I want to suggest one cause among the many, one small inroad of insanity, that has helped to reduce us to this state of physiophobia, fear and loathing of what is real.  It is that we dull the real from the pulpit.