Before I do anything, as a disclaimer let me just say that my backpack was stolen the other day. There wasn’t anything of real value in there so whoever took it, I hope you enjoy my beat up old gym sneakers. However, the article Peg provided for us was among the list of things taken and while I, good student that I am, read the whole thing beforehand and remember what it was about, I now don’t have it with me and am writing this response pretty much out of memory. So, be lenient with me.
Now, onto the response.
Growing up, there was a lot of things that could be said about me. Among them were the facts that I was, and still am on both counts, a Catholic and an unabashed lover of all things that go bump in the night and have a taste for warm human flesh…. and not necessarily in that order either.
Vampires, werewolves, the occasional swamp man (ten points to anyone who can tell me where that’s paraphrased from.), I’ve loved it all from first sight and no amount of churching or Catholic school was able to drag it out of me.
Of course, a good chunk of said childhood was spent fighting back the urge to roll my eyes every time my well-meaning parents speculated as to the potential damage being done to my fragile psyche by this continuous parade of ghouls and grisly dismemberments. It was a fight I often lost.
I tried to make it simple for them, “It’s just a TV show/movie,” I’d say. “It’s just what I enjoy watching, probably written into my DNA by the same Guy who decided I was gonna have a taste for Italian food and red Starbursts over pink. It doesn’t mean anything.” And the truth was it really didn’t and those (interminably long) arguments probably fostered my conviction that there’s very little truth to any of that “you are what you watch” claptrap. The fact that my parents even considered catering to the idea that my penchant for the occult signified some sort of lurking anything in my soul was ludicrous.
But now, I take a look through this article and find out that the Pagan team is just as willing to suppose that a healthy dose of “Buffy” can turn anyone into an aspiring Wiccan.
Now, before I get any deeper into this, I’ve got nothing against Paganism or any other religion. If it makes you happy and inspires you to be a little nicer to your fellow man then God or Buddha or Hecate bless ya.
But at the same time, like I still have to occasionally tell my folks, it’s just a TV show. A superbly put together show that I own on DVD, but a TV show nonetheless and I have to question the convictions of anyone who gets into anything based on the lead in for “Dawson’s Creek.”
In short, what I'm really wondering is, just how many teens who get into Wicca because they think Willow is cool is still are going to be into it ten or fifteen years down the road?
Of course, I admit that sometimes momentous things come from insubstantial beginnings and I’m sure that there are at least a few people who were led to something that really changed their lives for the better thanks to a 100 minute sit down with Neve Campbell and Robin Tunney. But all in all, my response to this article is pretty much the same response I have to those right wing evangelical groups screaming, often to their own choir, about how “Harry Potter” is luring a generation of children into Witchcraft.
Namely, I think they might be blowing things out of proportion just a little bit.
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