I had a dream night before last that I was on a werewolf prevention committee for a school. We would run a blood test and something like an MRI on prospective students. Our classes were “Guaranteed 100% Werewolf Free!” A girl applied to our school (she was 10ish) and right away we knew she was a werewolf. There was a big meeting about why she had applied and who put her up to it. And now that we knew she was a werewolf, what were we going to do with her?
So, all day, I’ve been thinking about the nature of discrimination. Sure, there’s the good kind of discrimination where you’re able to tell whether that designer handbag on Craig’s List is the real deal or a cheap knock-off. But what about the kind where a group of people are excluded because of some trait or characteristic they have no control over (like skin color, left or right handedness, ethnicity)? Can that ever be good? If so, where does the line fall, and how blurry is it? While I don’t have any actual polling data to back up this claim, I would submit that that parents who are NOT opposed to their children being devoured by werewolves are the miniscule minority. But if werewolves only change during nights of the full moon, is this really an issue during school hours? Does that make it okay for boarding schools to discriminate against werewolves, but not day schools? Do all werewolves even want to devour children, or do our preconceptions and prejudices bestow truthiness on this idea? It makes me wonder how much threat is over-perceived from Others – those not “like” us. It’s certainly smart to be aware of “stranger danger.” But the truth is (at least statistically) that we are much more likely to be killed by someone we know.