Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give VALUE to survival.

I like that quote above, written by CS Lewis. I think my obsession with CS Lewis is pretty known by now. For years and years I have loved his books, his ways of putting things, and his witty side too. It's so great that this weekend, a book by my favorite author will be in theaters as a movie. I really hope the movie captures the book and doesn't change the story a lot. I am really looking forward to it!

My friend Rachel was telling me about a part of CS Lewis's book God in the Dock. It's a chapter called "What Christmas Means to Me". He covers many areas, like what Christmas should and should not mean to him, the materialistic aspect of it versus the spiritual aspect, etc. One very humorous section describes the dread he would face, hearing the knock at the door when carollers came to sing, expecting a tip. He said how these same children knocking at his door at Christmas to sing him songs they didn't bother learning the words to, were the same "hooligans" who would be stealing things from neighbors or trespassing in his garden throughout the year, and now they want money. He also goes on to discuss the criminal system, and how those who want peace in the world often don't know what true peace is. It's very witty how he ties it all together! I'd love to hear what he'd have said during these days about the far left.

Warning:::::::: C.S. Lewis passage ahead, anyone with a low attention span, do not attempt, I repeat, do not attempt!! ...............Just kidding , hehe :) Very interesting stuff, in my opinion!

Here are parts of the story in his own words, and remember this was written awhile ago but still is totally related to today:

Voices 'off', outside the front door, annually remind us (usually at the most inconvenient moment) that the season of carols has come again. At my front door they are, once every year, the voices of the local choir; on the forty-five other annual occasions they are those of boys or children who have not even tried to learn to sing, or to memorize the words of the piece they are murdering. The instruments they play with real conviction are the door-bell and the knocker; and money is what they are after.

I am pretty sure that some of them are the very same hooligans who trespass in my garden, rob my orchard, hack down my trees and scream outside my windows, though everyone in the neighbourhood knows that there is serious illness in my family. I am afraid I deal with them badly in the capacity of 'waits'. I neither forgive like a Christian nor turn the dog on them like an indignant householder. I pay the blackmail. I give, but give ungraciously, and make the worst of both worlds.

I would be silly to publish this fact... Not long ago some of my younger neighbours broke into a little pavilion or bungalow which stands in my garden and stole several objects -- curious weapons and an optical instrument. This time the police discovered who they were. As more than one of them had been convicted of similar crimes before, we had high hopes that some adequately deterrent sentence would be given. But I was warned: 'It'll all be no good if the old woman's on the bench.' I had, of course, to attend the juvenile court and all fell out pat as the warning had said. The -- let us call her -- Elderly Lady presided. It was abundantly proved that the crime had been planned and that it was done for gain: some of the swag had already been sold. The Elderly Lady inflicted a small fine. that is, she punished not the culprits but their parents. But what alarmed me more was her concluding speech to the prisoners. She told them that they must, they really must, give up these 'stupid pranks'....

...This little incident seems to me characteristic of our age. Criminal law increasingly protects the criminal and ceases to protect his victim. One might fear that we were moving towards a Dictatorship of the Criminals or (what is perhaps the same thing) mere anarchy. But that is not my fear; my fear is almost the opposite....

...on these principles, when the State ceases to protect me from hooligans I might reasonably, if I could, catch and trash them myself. When the State cannot or will not protect, 'nature' is come again and the right of self-protection reverts to the individual. But of course if I could and did I should be prosecuted. The Elderly Lady and her kind who are so merciful to theft would have no mercy on me; and I should be pilloried in the gutter Press as a 'sadist' by journalists who neither know nor care what that word, or any word, means.

What I fear, however, is not, or not chiefly, sporadic outbreaks of individual vengeance. I am more afraid, our conditions being so like that of the South after the American Civil War, that some sort of Ku Klux Klan may appear and that this might eventually develop into something like a Right or Central revolution. For those who suffer are chiefly the provident, the resolute, the men who want to work who have built up, in the face of implacable discouragement, some sort of life worth preserving and wish to preserve it.... They are, in fact, the bearers of what little moral, intellectual, or economic vitality remains. They are not non-entities. There is a point at which their patience will snap....

...Revolutions seldom cure the evil against which they are directed; they always beget a hundred others. Often they perpetuate the old evil under a new name. We may be sure that, if a Ku Klux Klan arose, its ranks would soon be chiefly filled by the same sort of hooligans who provoked it. A Right of Central revolution would be as hypocritical, filthy and ferocious as any other. My fear is lest we should be making it more probable.

This may be judged an article unfit for the season of peace and goodwill. Yet there is a connection. Not all kinds of peace are compatible with all kinds of goodwill, nor do all those who say 'Peace, peace' inherit the blessing promised to the peacemakers. The real pacifist is he who promotes peace, not he who gasses about it. Peace, peace... we won't be hard on you... it was only a boyish prank... you had a neurosis... promise not to do it again... out of this in the long run I do not think either goodwill or peace will come. Planting new primroses on the primrose path is no long-term benevolence.

There! They're at it again. 'Ark, the errol hygel sings.' They're knocking louder. Well, they come but fifty times a year. Boxing Day is only two and a half weeks ahead; then perhaps we shall have a little quiet in which to remember the birth of Christ.