A Banshee In A Bear Trap
O Sweet God Almighty, what is this world coming to ?!?!
Not one, but two American priests – an Anglican/Episcopalian Catholic and a Roman Catholic – constantly quoting Khājeh Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, a Persian (That’s modern-day Iran!) Sufi (That’s a version or type of Islam!!), who was also known as “Hafez” and “the memorizer” and “the togue of the unseen” (Almost certain signs that he was a terrorist or spy or something dangerously nefarious!!!!!!).
We left spaces before ?!?!, so some folks could recover from “the vapors” and their back-of-the-hand-on-the-forehead swooning.
“Bless their hearts.” (If you didn’t get that last line, know it’s why God created the Google machine.)
"What in the name of Marco Blessed Polo is going on here?!" (A Potterism. Google-able, especially by those too young to appreciate Colonel Potter.) The Colonel would probably overserve that someone overcome by fear and trembling after hearing this news “sounds like a banshee in a bear trap.”
Hafez (c. 1325 AD to 1390), perhaps the most famous Persian poet ever, observed, “The words we speak become the house we live in.”
That insight has been a guiding principle of the way Fathers Tobin and Flynn conduct therapy sessions. (We assiduously avoid “practice therapy,” because we’ve “been at it so long, we’ve perfected out styles.”)
Working for eleven-plus years with college students, Father Flynn never allowed a student to say – a second time – “I’m under so much stress.” Students could – (if it were honest) - say “I’ve got so much -------------- (fill in the blank with the word or words of your choice) to do.” When, in counseling and their day-to-day lives, they made this simple change, other things in their lives began to change.
In the same way, Father Tobin won’t – again, for a second time – allow victims of marital or relationship physical violence and physical/emotional abuse to repeat the justification “He’s under so much pressure” or “He says he just gets so upset because he loves me so much.”
“The words we speak become the house we live in.”
And, the words we hear repeated over and over again - without facts to back them up, without the citations demanded by intellectual honesty, without challenge - can become the emotional prison cells in which we live.
On July 31, 1973, Father Pedro Arrupe, S.J., the superior general of the Jesuits, expressed the hope that “the paramount [goal] of Jesuit education” would be the formation of “a man for others,” someone who would “give himself to others in love – love which is his definitive and all-embracing dimension, that which gives meaning to all his other dimensions.”
On Monday, October 20, at Boston College, founded in 1863 and America’s tenth oldest Jesuit university, Nick Solhein, CEO of American Moment, addressed the Boston College Republicans. Solhein’s is a right-wing, Washington-based college-aged youth organization that attempts to form young adults for roles in politics and governance and quietly reshape the conservative establishment in Washington. His speech was titled “How to Implement the MAGA Agenda.”
Two days later, The Heights: For A Greater Boston College, the school’s student newspaper, gave a detailed report (“‘They Will Kill You’: BC Republicans Speaker Urges Audience To Be Willing To Die for Conservative Principles,” Nikita Osadchiv and Nicole Murphy). Solhein’s remarks (prepared and oft repeated???) were so what-ever-they-were and contrary to Father Arrupe’s vision that we will take them as direct quotes from The Heights with a word of caution: The words you speak become the house you live in and the words you listen to and believe can become the emotional prison cell of your life.
“Live in recognition of the fact that they will kill you and everybody that you love to get what they want - open borders, sex changes for minors, so-called gay marriages, health care for illegal immigrants, and so on. If they’re willing to kill the people making this policy, they’re more than willing to kill the people who voted for it, too..
"I want to start with a heavy exhortation - you need to be willing to be killed…
“There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in this country who would kill you for just being in this room…
“The moment that we’re in right now is truly catastrophic, perhaps even approaching the level of a civil war, or at the very least, all-out extrajudicial lawlessness…
“We urgently need the people in this room, specifically the men, to come to D.C. and get involved in governing, forcefully saying, ‘No, this is not the direction my country will go,’….”
The Heights report ended with
“Although the event was public and held on University property, an attendee barred a Heights photographer from taking photos for the duration of the talk.”
With as much respect as we can muster for this (apparently) deeply delusional child of God, we hope the BC Republicans weren’t paying him and we have to wonder where he obtained his unauthorized psychedelics.
Just a few observations:
“…they will kill you and everybody that you love to get what they want - open borders, sex changes for minors, so-called gay marriages, health care for illegal immigrants, and so on. If they’re willing to kill the people making this policy, they’re more than willing to kill the people who voted for it, too.
“Sex changes for minors” Based on a June 8, 2024 report from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (“Gender-affirming surgeries rarely performed on transgender youth.” Maya Brownstein.) reviewing a study published on June 27, 2024 by JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Network Open:
“The (JAMA) study found that cisgender [“straight” or “heterosexual”] minors and adults had substantially higher utilization of analogous gender-affirming surgeries than their TGD [transgender and gender-diverse] minors in the U.S. ‘We found that gender-affirming surgeries are rarely performed for transgender minors, suggesting that U.S. surgeons are appropriately following international guidelines around assessment and care,’ said co-author [of the JAMA report] Elizabeth Boskey instructor n the Department of Social and Behavioral Science.
“Lead author Dannie Dai, research data analyst in the Department of Health Policy and Management, added, ‘Our findings suggest that legislation blocking gender-affirming care among TGD youth is not about protecting children, but is rooted in bias and stigma against TGD identities and seeks to address a perceived problem that does not actually exist.’”
Remember when, in the run-up to the November 2024 presidential election, the Republican candidate hallucinated:
“… You know, they take your kid - there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Okay? Without parental consent. At first, when I was told that was actually happening, I said, you know, it’s an exaggeration. No: it happens. It happens. There are areas where it happens.”
Now think about it! As our fathers would tell you, “Use the brain God gave you.” First, the most ridiculous part of that pasture-left-bovine-by-product: How did the kid even get to the hospital and who signed the requisite permissions and the mountain of insurance forms? Are we supposed to believe any hospital would actually perform such expensive surgery without compensation? On average, time from catching the school bus in the morning to walking in the front door after football or basketball practice: roughly ten or eleven hours.
Kaiser Permanente My Doctor Online (“Recovering from Vaginoplasty and Other Gender-Affirming Genital Surgeries’) reports:
“Recovery time from these surgeries depends on the type of surgery you have and your body’s response to surgery and healing…
“Typical hospital stays are:
Full-depth vaginoplasty: 3 to 6 days [A full-depth vaginoplasty is a surgical procedure that creates or reconstructs a vagina in transgender women]
Shallow-depth vaginoplasty: 1 to 3 days [A shallow-depth vaginoplasty is a surgical procedure that creates a shallow vaginal cavity and external female genitalia for transgender women.]
Orchiectomy: 0 to 1 day [An orchiectomy is a surgical procedure where one or both testicles are removed.]
“Recovery times depend on your body and how you’re feeling, including:
Full-depth vaginoplasty: about 8 weeks
Shallow-depth vaginoplasty: about 4 weeks
Orchiectomy: about 2 weeks”
“It can take 9 to 12 months for your body to fully adjust and heal after surgery.”
We’re not sure where Mr. Solhein resurrected his verbal Halloween-esque fear-inducing rhetoric, but here’s news. The Netherlands was the first country to legalize gay marriage in December 2000 and it went into effect on April 1, 2001. Greece and Estonia legalized same sex marriages in 2024. At present, thirty-eight – 38 – countries have legalized same-sex marriage. The June 26, 2015 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges decision affirmed that gay marriage is constitutional nationwide. On June 17, 2025, a Williams Institute of the UCLA School of Law report estimated the number of married same-sex couples in the United States at 823,000, more than double the 390,000 married same-sex couples at the time of Obergefell. In addition, “nearly 300,000 children under 18 are being raised by married same-sex couples” and “married couples account for the majority (59%) of cohabitating same-sex couples in the U.S….”
Solhein’s effort at terror-fication (“Yes. We made up that one.) included “There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in this country who would kill you for just being in this room…”
“Hundreds of thousands, if not millions… who would kill you just for being in this room.”
On October 19, the digital news service BuzzFeed surveyed “violence” among the 7 million marchers in the 2,700-plus No Kings rallies nationwide. Typical of the reports: the Austin, Texas Police web site declared “The rally remanded peaceful, with no arrests reported.” San Diego Police Department estimated their crowd as 25,000 and “once again, no one was arrested.” NYPD put the crowds there “at more than 100,000 across all five boroughs” and no arrests.
But, in order to raise the fear level, Solhein repeated that unverified and unverifiable – in other words, “outright lie” – statement. The message is simple: “Be so afraid that you will vote for a strong man” or the nebulous “they will come after and kill you.”
We read the following this statement more than a dozen times: “If they’re willing to kill the people making this policy, they’re more than willing to kill the people who voted for it, too…” In, out of. or circumnavigating the statement for context, we will can’t understand it.
If you want to speak the truth, name the “they.”
And don’t forget the speaker’s female-phobic declaration ““We urgently need the people in this room, specifically the men, to come to D.C. and get involved in governing, forcefully…”
He wants to make American political life like the ole tree huts of four or five generations ago with the sign “No Girls Allowed.”
Bless his soul! So frightened and frightening!
With gratitude to Colonel Potter, “That guy sounds like a banshee in a bear trap.”