Steve,

In 2002, I had a really good clinical psychologist, Dr. Marty S*, come in to talk to our teaching staff.

His opening?

The "thing" that a culture doesn't want to talk about, is often already in full force.

His presentation was on the increasing anxiety in our culture and in particular the perils of perfectionism and how it was manifesting itself in our student body.

And we weren't talking about it.

My reason for asking him in was because my grade 11 English students were no longer using natural metaphors to describe themselves: my heart is the sea cliff bastion to my word, my soul no bird of prey...my anger no flame in a tinder dry forest of reason.

He used my lament to end his talk by trying to warn us about the new metaphor taking over the natural world: the computer.

I am hoping Dr. Marty will forgive my paraphrase.

"Computers, even though they model perfection, catch viruses, freeze up under pressure and yes, they even crash."

"They, like humans, are not perfect. And yet if more and more people think that they have to be perfect, that they must compare themselves to a digital world, they will crash. "

"But not before they tear each other apart."

"Can you imagine the energy needed to always be right? To always be on the stage you have built for yourself, to have no time for the green room?"

"Imagine having no time for reflection except from those holding up the mirrors you ardently demand they robotically grasp?"

"To be afflicted with perfectionism means to never recognize one's faults, or to never be able to apologize, even worse to never be compassionately forgiven by others let alone oneself."

"Can you imagine the anger if not rage behind such a learning disability?"

"To forget that one is human, that a metaphor is not just to some machine, that metaphors are, as Douglas Adams once wrote, to show, "...the interconnectedness of all things." is to risk a life in perpetual adolescent melancholy. "

Boy, was he ever ahead of his time.

Steve, once again you've tapped into something really really important and you are talking about it... for us.