Promoted from the diaries…

There are laws on the books that make it a crime to punch your neighbor in the nose.

If you are punched in the nose the person who did it should be punished, and hopefully will be.

If you are punched in the nose again by a different person hopefully that person also will be punished.

If you are punched in the nose again by yet another person hopefully that person will also be punished, but since there seems to be a trend forming of metacarpal-nasal impaction involving *your* nasal, it seems like you might want to take some steps to curb this trend.

If it honestly and truly is through no fault of your own that your nose gets punched so often you may consider taking self-defense classes so you can block the punches. You may wear a faceguard on a helmet to block the punches. You may in some way make it clear to potential nose assailants that you are not one with whom to be trifled (or at least one who will retaliate with force to any attempted nose punches). At any rate, you should make it clear that your nose is proactively protected.

In other words, simply declaring your nose to be a “no-punch zone” (even if you wear shirts and hats announcing this fact) and/or insisting that the police will prevent the next nose punch seems, well, foolish.

But this is MADness and doesn’t address the root problem—that there are people out there who have hands and who punch noses for no good reason.

So perhaps another thing to consider is *why* some people who have hands feel compelled to punch you in the nose. Clearly not all people with hands punch you in the nose—I’d hazard a guess that a clear and overwhelming majority of persons with hands do not punch you in the nose. So there must be something different, a bit off, messed up, not right about the persons who choose to punch you in the nose. Maybe, just maybe, one course of action could be to figure out which sorts of people are the sorts of people disposed to nose-punching and…

(…I’ll bet you thought I was going to say “cut off their hands.” No. I mean, I suppose we could cut off lots and lots of people’s hands, or even everyone’s hands, and that will certainly stop nose punching, but it seems like it would needlessly punish many people who would never have imagined punching noses. There’s also the problem that cutting off everyone’s hands won’t stop nose punchers from becoming ankle kickers (see, because they still have something in them that makes them want to visit violence upon others, so when they can no longer punch noses they’ll resort to something else, like ankle kicking).)

No, what I was going to suggest was that you try to help nose punchers to be better persons: persons who are not disposed to punching noses. Yes, this may require telling persons that some of their underlying life truths are wrong and bad and lead to bad things like being a nose-puncher.

And yes, telling someone that sort of thing may hurt some people’s feelings and make it sound like you believe that *your* truth is somehow more true than *their* truth, but something along those lines is already contained in the definition of “truth.” If it isn’t, any conversation about nose-punching being right or wrong goes out the window and the question comes down to brute force and government coercion and you’ll just have to hope that nose punchers and their sympathizers do not obtain a political majority, because your nose, for whatever reason, will be a prime target of the “new normal.”

But since we’re still operating on the notion that nose punching can be called “wrong,” and that “wrong” has a firm meaning of some sort, we can still talk about trying to convince nose punchers that nose punching is wrong and bad and is bad for them and they should stop doing that, not because it will get them punched back (or worse), or because they might get punished by the government, but because it is *wrong* and *bad*.

So you have three options: 1) continue getting punched in the nose by those who, despite laws and “no punch zone” hats, remain committed to nose punching; 2) curb nose punching by making it clear that nose punchers will be repelled; or 3) curb nose punching by convincing nose punchers that nose punching is bad and wrong and they should not want to do it.

(Well, I guess, 4) cutting off everyone’s hands just because a few people are nose punchers, is another option, but it seems really unsmart.)

I choose both 2 and 3. You?