A Song for Issy Bradley and 90s Kids Am I Right

He keeps talking but Claire can't keep up with his words, she can't catch them, they're flying past her ears like tiny bids, fluttering to the open door and out into the hospital corridor. He has made Issy's recovery contingent on her faith and she doesn't know how she will ever forgive him. - Carys Bray, A Song for Issy Bradley

A Song for Issy Bradley made me bawl. A lot. Not just the sort of weepy, whoa, is a book making me cry? kind of sniffly uncertainty, but full on sobs. It does so many things phenomenally well, but after trying to go to sleep last night following a marathon reading that left me blinking at my clock as it insistently told me that it's 2:30 AM, I couldn't shake one thing. This book would have been near flawless if it had been set in the 1990s. But it's not, and to me that's a real problem.

I stopped watching The Walking Dead after the season in the prison, whichever that one is. I've been reading the books for a long time, and couldn't stand what they did to my favorite character (Andrea) and how much time they spent with my least favorite character (The Governor). Aside from a handful of conversations and the occasional headline, I haven't looked back. Which is fine. There's a lot of show there and a lot of it is gross and I can get gross stuff from other places, like having children.

The upshot of this is that I don't have a lot of input in conversations about The Walking Dead TV show because even though I have intimate knowledge with the first handful of seasons and the source material, I acknowledge that too much has changed since then for me to have much to say about the current status of the show. I'd probably still get some stuff right (whoa, Carl sucks), but I'd definitely mess up on others (isn't it cool how alive Glen is and how dead he isn't?)

That's my problem with Carys Bray's portrayal of the LDS (shorthand for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) church in A Song for Issy Bradley. And I need to include some big massive caveats before I go any further. I usually don't read online reviews of books before I write about them, because I want to make sure my opinions are my own, and also online reviews are written by Mogwai who have eaten chicken out of a bucket after midnight (I mean the post-rock indie band--they get indigestion). But last night/this morning, I couldn't help it. The results were about what I expected. People with little knowledge about the church were pleased that the book confirmed a lot of their suspicions. People who had left the church a decade or so ago were ecstatic to see the realities of their lives portrayed in rich literature, and people who were still faithful saw little of their faith expressed on the pages.

This is basically my bishop's face when he sees this book

I didn't want to fall into one of those categories, and don't think I do. When I picked up the book I welcomed a harsh and critical look at a church and its surrounding culture that I think is deeply flawed in a very human way (as institutions run by humans are want to do). And when it comes to characters, Bray just absolutely nails it. There are no villains here, and no heroes, either. Everyone is flawed and trying their best and on a journey to improve. That's how I think about my religion, too. I think it has a past replete with genuine horrors, a present that is sometimes beautiful and sometimes extremely damaging, and a future that is unknown but I'm basically optimistic about because despite everything I just have to stick with optimism or I don't get out of bed in the morning. That and an eagerness to find out what new color combinations the marshmallow engineers have come up with next in the world of Lucky Charm rainbows.

Anyone can be brave for five minutes or an hour or two. The bravery no one talks about is the hardest bravery of all. When you get up in the morning even though you'd rather be dead, that's brave.

Let me give you a quick synopsis: the Bradley family is one of those perfect Mormon families we all grew up with (or in?). Ian is the Bishop, a leadership position that is unpaid but requires enormous amounts of personal time, and he throws himself into the calling with all of his heart. When we first meet the Bradley family he is missing his son Jacob's 7th birthday party, and his wife Claire is singlehandedly planning the day. Claire was a convert to the church, having joined it shortly after falling in love with Ian.

They have four kids. In addition to Jacob, there's 4-year-old Issy and two older teens. Zippy is the oldest, and confused about the conflicting lessons at church about female sexuality. She's been taught all her life that it's the boys who want sex, and it's the girls' job to keep them away at all costs. Except she kinda wants it too; is there something wrong with her? Then there's Alma, though he insists everyone call him Al, because Alma is a girl's name. Al isn't interested in explaining that he was named after a Book of Mormon prophet to his peers, even though his dad calls it a missionary opportunity.

The family has to deal with a tragedy that is portrayed so expertly that I am still grieving. Even while telling myself that none of the characters are real. I'm just gutted by it. Faith and family are tested, etc. I want to point out that from my experience, this is not a typical LDS family, but one that I know exists. Even the book acknowledges that while Alma isn't allowed to participate in team sports because they're too "worldly," many other Mormon kids are. Even PG-13 goes to far for these folks. There's no TV, except Book of Mormon cartoon videos (yeah, that frickin scam). It's basically Gilligan's Island. These guys are hardcore.

Early on in the book I was delighted by a gentle (and sometimes not) skewering of many LDS tropes. And much of it resonated with me down to my very bones. Some of the things I was taught as a kid in church I now consider genuinely damaging to adult life and I've seen firsthand how it can be absolutely devastating to victims of sexual assault and abuse, to name just one example. I was grimly amused by a teen girl's complaint that while she was given multiple handouts about how to prepare to be a perfect and pure wife, the boys her age were playing basketball in the gym. The assumption being that men had little to aspire to other than church service and jobs, while women had a complex code of domestic perfection and femininity that needed intensive training. A scene where the Bradley mother, Claire, just destroys one of Mormon culture's worst object lessons by indulging in some ABC gum in front of a young women's teacher is pretty priceless. 

At times the portrayals veer toward caricatures, especially when given the limited handful of side characters the Bradley family deals with. But I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Fiction (and often nonfiction) distills characters to their most concentrated forms. Timelines compress. In one book we're shown every bad example and painful church lesson an adult has experienced over a lifetime taking place within just a few weeks of time for the Bradleys. That's a reasonable writing technique, but it's worth recognizing.

There are only just a few ward members (for the uninitiated, wards are another word for local congregations) that we meet, and they are all broad stereotypes. There is one "cool" Mormon leader who gives out Kit-Kats and one time takes his shirt off and spins it around his head during a rugby game and everyone is kind of shocked but also amused. But aside from him, it's a rogues gallery of the weirdos every LDS person meets on their journey of holding fast to the iron rod. The doomsday prepper, the "old maid" who is approaching 30 and is still  unmarried, the purity obsessed young women's leader. The Bradleys unfortunately carry the brunt of the responsibility to show that Mormons can be normal and funny and sometimes awful and trying their very best but failing most of the time. 

Honestly, I think that Bray pulls as many punches as she delivers. And there are real or at least perceived miracles that happen here. Prayers are answered, though in ways not anticipated (a very, very Mormon kind of thing to happen), and the boring conclusion I was anticipating -- a wholesale abandoning of the faith by the Bradley family -- doesn't happen. I think there's fondness in Bray's portrayal of her culture (she says she left the church at age 30, replacing it with writing), even though she has a hefty amount of anger about the lessons she learned. One online reviewer, post-gremlin transformation, called the book "preachy."

In short, I think Bray does a fantastic job of preserving a near exact portrayal of the experience of being a Mormon teen the same time that I was a Mormon teen. I was amazed at how similar the experience was in the UK compared to my Utah upbringing. I have a hunch that, similar to my experience in Mexico, sometimes Mormons in other countries were even more zealous in some ways due to being a tiny minority. I felt sometimes they had a chip on their shoulder to prove to us Utah missionaries how hard they can Mormon. This accuracy is so uncanny that the handful of times when it seems to get something fundamentally wrong, it was jarring. The problem is that Bray stopped watching The Mormon Show several seasons ago, never got caught up, and wrote a thinkpiece about it anyway.

This book is what it feels like to be Mormon in the 90s perfectly, but it's set in the 2010s, and that's a problem. At one point, someone quotes a passage from a church lesson manual from 1993, and Claire points out that the manual is outdated, that a lot can happen in twenty years. The lesson teacher points out that the church is the same today as it was yesterday. This is a very common Mormon refrain and patently false. I wish that Bray had taken her own advice. The church is in many ways massively different than it was when I grew up in it. I would argue that in most ways it's for the better.

The way church leaders teach about mental illness, for example, is vastly different than the portrayal in the book, even if it feels more or less in line with my experience from a couple of decades ago. I remember a mother who suffered from profound depression who was viewed more or less as having a personality flaw. Depression was often viewed as the result of unresolved sin. Obviously that's horrible, and there has been massive amounts of progress on that front since. Church leaders today offer referrals to therapists, and will even pay for it out of member donations. In General Conference meetings (our twice-yearly world-wide church meetings), mental illness is spoken about frankly and kindly. In my volunteering I work with phenomenal LDS therapists who are fluent in both modern research and the intricacies and complications of religion.

Does that mean that people from my generation and before don't still harbor and believe the things we were taught before? Nah. There are still problems. But not in the monolithic form that is portrayed in A Song for Issy Bradley. The same goes for some of the horrible lessons young women were taught about personal purity. Those manuals are no longer in use, and since I spent some time teaching young men and women in church, I can say that the topics are handled with much more maturity and sensitivity now.

It would be blindly optimistic, even for me, to assume that these lessons still don't find their way into discussions on Sundays, because those kinds of habits die hard. But they are dying. Because Bray has apparently been out of the loop for some time, she understandably misses some stuff. It's obvious especially when her 2014-or-so Mormons aren't talking about the things that are really dividing members right now, especially the teens she writes about. There is a quantifiable exodus of young Mormons from the church that has little to do with the subjects Bray brings up. Millennials are leaving the church (all churches, actually) often because of a divide between their personal conscience and the views of the church on social issues. There's some pretty good red meat there for a critic of the LDS faith to explore. Instead Bray focuses on the things that apparently bothered her when she was young.

A couple of weeks ago I talked about reputations, and how I wanted (and still want) people to see me as I am today, not how I was when I was younger. I'd be sad as heck if someone who hasn't spent time with me lately wrote a book with me as a character today who still acted like I did ten or fifteen years ago. It would gut me, to be honest. I'm a big advocate of letting people change and progress, and feel the same way about institutions. There's value in soberly assessing the history of a person or church or nation, while also acknowledging progress made today. Like, look at how dumb Nintendo was in the 90s. We can all laugh at that while still acknowledging that Breath of the Wild was dope AF.

All of this would be fixed so easily if she'd just set the book in the 90s. Church members reading it would be confronted with how different the church was almost 20-30 years ago and forced to really notice how much things change and progress over one's lifetime. Even in a church that was "the same yesterday, today, and forever." We could use it as a way to remind ourselves that if there is something we learn at church that doesn't sit well with our conscience, that we were all given the agency to do what we think is right. And sometimes history is on our side when it all shakes out. Remember when everyone thought Sonic the Hedgehog was better than Super Mario World, but you knew better? It's like that.

Outsiders, who are going to be inclined to see the portrayal in whatever light their preconceived notions have set, would at least know that this story is a time capsule. I've loved reading stories about other's faith and religious traditions, even when I find aspects of it foreign at best and horrible at worst, I can also see beauty in aspects of it. I think the LDS tradition could and should have that light shined on it as well. A Song for Issy Bradley gets so close. I'd recommend it to anyone curious about the culture, with the big addendum that things have changed since then. And the assumption based on past events that it will change a lot in the future.

I think many members will enjoy it, too. Watching the family deal with tragedy from the LDS perspective was especially powerful for me, and gave me a searing insight into our particular form of grieving. We are taught sometimes that we should be happy, even in spite of horrible events, because we have a more enlightened viewpoint on God's plan. Sometimes we forget that it's OK to be sad.

The postman slides fat bundles of commiseration through the letter box every day: heartfelt wishes and bad poems in muted, floral pastels. People write little notes inside the cards. She is longing for a note saying "I'm so sorry"; she is sick of explanations and justifications.

All that being said, be prepared for some very frank discussions of things a lot of LDS consider sacred. Even if we talk about them all of the time at least as frankly and irreverently as Bray does in our private conversations, it's startling to see them on a page. And don't be surprised if amid all of the dead-on details, there are a few big missteps. Some of it might be hard to hear, too. The book saves its most potent vitriol for Mormon culture, while rarely critiquing what we call doctrine, but I know that those things can be hard to separate.

As with most fiction, there's truth and then there's Truth. Bray gets some of the truth wrong, in my experience, but when it comes to the Truth--the capturing of life's essence in all its pain and hurt and everything--she's accomplished something pretty amazing here. 

Not a book

Hey everybody it's Tuesday, which means blog time! But I didn't read a book this time. I'm halfway through one, I guess, but honestly I can barely read anything. Usually comic books are a good break when I get overwhelmed by the combination of life's logistical challenges along with just its good old fashioned emotional challenges, but honestly I haven't even been able to read those lately either.

Here are things that are bothering me (in no particular order): hurricanes, wildfire, DACA, Puerto Rico, white supremacist rallies, and officer-involved shootings. CHIP, subsidized health insurance that saved my family when I was working hard but still couldn't afford insurance, has had its funding expire. Oh, and nuclear war. Then yesterday we experienced the worst mass shooting in recent history and it's so ho-hum that it didn't even seem to take halfway through the news cycle before we were moving on to another rock star who died (and then didn't, and then did). I was wondering, by the way, why everyone points out that this was the worst mass shooting in recent history. As a naturally curious person, I thought, how recent is recent, and how bad have they been before?

Well, buckle up. Like, have you heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre? I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't, since it wasn't included in any history books and was almost completely buried until 1996, the 75th anniversary of the massacre. With eyewitnesses dying of old age, a group called The Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was formed to interview survivors, study documents, and hear testimonies from the public. Their report found that "After three and a half years of intensive research, the commission found what had been hinted at for four decades. There had been a pattern of deliberate distortion of facts regarding the riot and even the destruction of vital documents and a subsequent coverup."

The build-up to the "riot" is complicated (generally considered an argument between a black teen boy and a white teen girl in an elevator followed by threats from the community of lynching), but the upshot is that the thriving oil community of Greenwood, often called "Black Wall Street," where hotels, restaurants, and fur stores thrived was burned to the ground by National Guardsmen opening up on the crowd with machine guns, private and police planes dropping balls of turpentine and dynamite. Approximately 300 were killed, 800 were admitted to hospitals, 6,000 black citizens were arrested, and 10,000 black residents were left homeless.

What about the Colfax massacre of 1873? A bunch of crazy election stuff happened that I don't have the time or energy to relate, but the upshot was that Southern Democrats were ticked and tried to take over the parish by force. Republicans recruited black soldiers to defend the place, and the Democrats organized a militia of confederate war veterans and locals called the White League to attack. 60 black soldiers fled into the woods and were shot in the back and thrown in the river. The remaining defenders surrendered in the parish and stacked their guns, but were shot anyway. White soldiers ran down the fleeing men and shot them from horseback, some were hung. It's estimated that up to 150 were killed. In a Supreme Court case in 1876, the case against the insurgents was thrown out and no one was convicted.

There's the Mountain Meadows Massacre, when Mormon settlers, perhaps terrified of American troops threatening the new settlements and after hearing rumors of a party set to attack, dressed as natives and attacked a group of over 100 settlers. When someone in the party recognized the "natives" as white men, the plan to just scare them away turned into a massacre. Every man, woman, and child was killed (sometimes with clubs and knives) except for children deemed to young to remember. These were adopted by Mormon families. The church tried to blame it on nearby Paiutes but eventually pinned the blame on John D. Lee, acting on his own.

Massacres are one thing, the systematic genocide of native tribes from the state of California another. A conservative estimate puts the amount of Native Americans killed just in California by state militias, vigilantes, and federal officers somewhere between 9 and 16,000. In one instance, after native slaves rose up and killed two slave masters, US Infantry and Cavalry troops fired into a village, killing approximately 800 Pomo villagers.

I don't even have a point here, other than this: when you're an inquisitive person who asks a lot of questions you find out quite quickly that some of them have very, very bad answers. Those stories are the tip of the iceberg. Most lists of American single-shooter mass killings start at 1949 with Howard Unruh, a decorated World War II sharpshooter who left his house one morning at 9:20 AM, and shot 13 people dead and wounded two others with a German Luger.

I've been reading a lot about other countries this year. India, South Korea, China, Nigeria, and Cambodia, just to name a few. We're all kind of used to it by now. Every day or two (most times a few times a day) we're hit with a headline that makes our heart sink. 50 killed in an ambush by Boko Haram in Nigeria. Ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar by Theravada Buddhists. 300,000 dead in Syria with another 135,000 missing. For my whole life when I read these articles, I think, that's terrible, I'm so grateful that I live somewhere safe.

But I don't. We're that country, too. We have massacres and genocides. We have racial unrest. We have sectarian violence where a majority religion oppresses a minority. A white supremacist stabbing two men defending a Muslim woman on a train in Portland. A young man who loved posing with guns and a Confederate flag shooting worshipers in a Black Christian church. Three men who called themselves The Crusaders caught planning to bomb an apartment complex housing 120 people, most of them Somali refugees. We have terrorist attacks from foreign extremists.

And for a relatively young country, we've got a history of atrocities that rivals all but the very worst. We don't have a Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot, but we do have Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan.

I don't even know what to say, you guys. This sucks. I don't have any way to wrap it up in a bow that makes us all feel good about the future. This has been a huge blow to Howie's Optimism Club. I seem to rebound, sure. But how much can we put up with? Perusing the headlines today, apparently it's a lot.

ADDENDUM: Rereading this on Wednesday morning, I can see a couple of themes. First of all, as we can see from most of these massacres, the feeling of safety I was talking about has always been a myth. I'm safe because I'm white and a dude and have spent most of my time in middle to lower middle class neighborhoods where the police are our friends and the government was designed to help me succeed. Sometimes these shootings are shocking because they effect people we don't normally associate with getting shot.

Obviously mass shootings make up a tiny fraction of gun deaths in the United States (most of them are suicides). Maybe the most pernicious of human biases is the one that tells us that we're safe because we don't belong to a certain group. We think women who are being abused are married to alcoholics, because that's what movies tell us. We think that rapists hide in dark corners and target women dressed in tube tops. And we think that we're safe from gun crimes because we don't live in housing projects. Until we start seeing ourselves in every person who is suffering in America, instead of thanking God that we aren't at risk, every one of us has something to fear.

I also recognize that there are places less safe than here. Of course there are. This isn't Mexico, it isn't Syria, it isn't Venezuala. In my neighborhood we don't have concrete walls with glass embedded in the tops. There aren't bars in the gas station windows. But I also believe that one of the least effective ways of dealing with problems is to point out that someone else is suffering even more. Everyone deserves to be able to improve their lives. Whatever the current state.

Archie and Reputations

I opened this window, stared at the customary blank white space, and said audibly to myself: "Am I going to write about Archie today?" And I guess the truth is that I am. That's exactly what I'm going to do.

Up until the last few months, I was aware of Archie in the same way that I was aware of Betty Boop. It was painful to look at and served as evidence that there have been vast amounts of time when the entertainment landscape was so dark, so dismal, that these were considered viable forms of entertainment. Like The Munsters, circus peanuts, and savory gelatin dishes, it made me question the generations before me. What could these people possibly have for me, wisdom-wise, when these things are their legacy?

But here's the thing about everything that's going on with Archie books now. It's awesome. Not because Archie was awesome (he wasn't), but because with the right team, comics are like house-flipping shows: you can take a disgusting property and turn it into a pretty nice little bungalow that only smells faintly of cats, and that's only if you knew what to smell for. There's a good chance I lost track of that metaphor before bringing it home.

On the other hand, I see regularly on Facebook that I'm supposed to stop being such a fanboy about Star Wars if I don't like the new stuff that keeps getting released. Like because it says Star Wars on it, it's unpatriotic of me to not be into the boring Force Awakens with Boring Kylo Ren and Pretty Awesome Rey but Really Boring Another Death Star. Here's my take on Star Wars and The Goonies and Back to the Future and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure: I liked them when I was a kid and it is relatively public knowledge that kids are not the most objective critics of the media.

When I rewatch them I still like them and it's impossible to separate the good feelings they bring to me from the actual quality of said movies. But they're just movies to me. If the rumored new Bill and Ted movie is good, I will be happy because it's one more thing in this world that enhances my life and makes me smile. If it's bad, it's bad. Lots of things are bad and that's actually good because if I even spend my entire life chasing truly great media it would be impossible. Thank goodness that people make bad things that I can ignore, guilt-free, while I'm also shamed for ignoring Game of Thrones.

I think there are three and a half good Star Wars movies. That's not even that bad of a track record considering that the guy who made them also made Howard the Duck. I wish we could look at every new movie the way we look at every new Star Wars video game. Which is to say there have been more bad ones than good ones but the good ones are very good so maybe this will be one of them? If not, I can treat it like the Raiders' historically miserable Sunday Night Football game: I thank God that my livelihood doesn't depend on the success of those things and move on with my life.

The irony of all of this that I can't shake is that I went to the library today to pick up the new Jughead comic that I'd reserved I also grabbed two Star Wars comics, because even if I am completely ambivalent about the movies, I have loved the new comics unequivocally. The Leia book is amazing, for example. In it, Leia tells Han that the Alliance could use "a hairy beast and his copilot," and when Han tells her Chewie is the copilot, she says, "I know."

That's the first best "I know" said in the Star Wars universe, in my opinion, and that's a tall frickin' order.

And when I looked up the Leia book real quick to remember some stuff about it I saw that it was written by Mark Waid, which is bananas because here I go talking about Archie which was what I planned on doing in the first place before that detour. Mark Waid writes Archie, you see. And boy does he do a good job.

The first book is drawn by Fiona Staples, who is the best, and who you probably recognize from Saga if you pay attention to Saga, which you should (but don't read it on the bus or plane or whatever). Also the spinoffs are amazing. Jughead is drawn by Erica Henderson, who is also the best, and who draws Squirrel Girl, and just got turned over to Ryan North, who writes Squirrel Girl and you guys I have written a lot about how much I love Squirrel Girl.

Here's my point. When I was in junior high I was not well-liked by the masses. I was teased a lot and ignored when I was not being teased. I sort of got my act together by the end of high school and made a lot of friends who would have traditionally been out of my league because by then we didn't care as much about leagues. Except the people I grew up with never really got on board with me being a different person. All they cared about was the kid who picked his nose a lot in elementary school and who was weird in junior high but not the kid who was kind of funny and learning to be kinder. People didn't want to let me change, though. They liked the good old days when everyone knew my place and I didn't somehow manage to go on multiple dates with a cheerleader.

See I set out to write an aggressively non-political post because I was looking through old Facebook stuff and saw that I had friends who would comment and like my stuff years ago who almost certainly have unfollowed me by now and I think that's a huge bummer. But also it's hard not to look at people who are angry that football makes them uncomfortable now that the predominately black player base who have been well-behaved up until now are suddenly showing that they aren't happy and guess what, they never were. Not because they aren't well-compensated, but because even with all of their money they see that their neighborhoods are still terrible and their brothers, sisters, and cousins are still scared for their lives when they get pulled over at night.

When I watch a new Star Wars movie, I mourn a childhood that felt easier, though I know that's just hindsight talking. I don't think about how there was a kid my senior year who grew up with me who would not let me be anything other than the nerd he remembered. Who would roll up balls of clay in pottery class and throw them at me while kids who I thought were my friends sat next to him and laughed. I remember how my confidence would dissolve and I was the same old kid who dreaded going to school and was afraid to walk home when the other kids were so I would play tag with my friends until the streets were clear and I felt safe.

It's not the movies that have changed. It's me. They're still goofy and have good sword fights and bad acting and lots of Muppets. I want to get that feeling back but it's gone, and lightsabers aren't going to bring that back. If you're watching football and it makes you feel bad now, because you don't like thinking that this country isn't fair, it makes sense to lash out and write a rant about just letting people enjoy things, just like you did when your friends rightly asked how the First Order somehow has the budget to make a Starkiller Base when they seem to have no discernible revenue stream. You just want things to be the way they were, even if those things were bad. Because it's always easier that way.

Those good old days are gone in Archie, too. Archie and Betty are best friends and next-door-neighbors who then become the perfect couple until something kind of minor happens but it's big enough that it makes them realize they shouldn't be a couple anymore. What they didn't bank on was that after being a couple they couldn't just go back to being best friends anymore. Especially when Archie starts dating Veronica and Betty starts dating Sayid. They can't even play video games together anymore without getting in trouble with their significant others. Was Sayid in the original comics? It seems unlikely. Anyway, also who cares? Who cares about any of what happened before because these are some of the best writers and artists currently working and they could be writing a Brady Bunch meets The Munsters comic and I'd be reading it. OK come to think of it I would be reading that no matter what.

But wait you guys, though. WAIT. This isn't even all that's going on with Archie! There's also Afterlife With Archie, in which the gang fight a zombie apocalypse! There is The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, about the titular teenage witch and her war with Madam Satan! There is Archie vs. Predator, for goodness sake. I included links to prove that I didn't make any of this up!

There are daily things that are terrifying in this life and world and I write about them regularly. I often delve as deep as I can into the worst of what humanity has to offer and I'll be darned it if isn't nice to stick my head up above the surface of that muck now and again to take a deep fresh breathe of something surprising and fun. So this week it's Archie. Deal with it.

But hey what if you remember really liking something but when you get older you realize that it has some really profound flaws but you think there's enough good there to keep fighting for it but instead of Star Wars it's your country or your church? What would you do to make it better? Hint: whatever it is, if it's not just keeping quiet and being grateful that it exists at all because anything else would potentially make someone uncomfortable, it's wrong. That's what I learned this week and also why I needed something fun and cute to read and write about, you're welcome.