Laughing at what's ludicrous is opinion of an important sort
She was an old woman, living in a California nursing home.
Given Elgin was reeling from a student's vicious attack on a teacher and allegations that one of its police officers beat a restrained suspect, one might wonder how former ballerina Lisa Boehm managed to become the talk of the town just days before her death last week.
Only in a nation obsessed with telling others how they should live their lives could the experiences of a teenager nearly 70 years ago suddenly be given such import.
Shelley Barnett, a member of the Elgin Heritage Commission, quit the group because a biographical piece on a Lisa Boehm School of Dance exhibit included a reference to the then-teenage Boehm appearing before Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering of the Third Reich while she was the prima ballerina of the Berlin Opera.
"I don't consider that wonderful or something I want to spend public money on," Barnett said in a news story.
She was also miffed that when she raised objections to the reference, other commission members laughed at her.
According to one commission member, though, that isn't exactly what they were laughing at. Bill Briska says the commission laughed at Barnett's contention that a teenage ballerina not only shouldn't have danced in front of such evil, but should have pulled out a gun and shot the pair.
They should have laughed at her.
Whole sovereign nations -- full of adults and backed by large armies, navies and air corps -- trembled before Hitler. They joined him, welcomed him and appeased him before Winston Churchill and the United States finally said, "Enough."
And Barnett lives in a country where people are so timid they bridle at signing their names to letters to the editor, opting instead for the perceived anonymity of the Web.
Boehm returned to her native Switzerland and eventually settled in Elgin. She was, like many of those with big talent, temperamental, self-absorbed and only as sociable as she needed to be to further her own goals. But she also imparted her skills to generations of young dancers and imbued them with her love of the art. Her version of "The Nutcracker" ran for 33 years at Hemmens auditorium.
That Barnett believes a skinny teenage Boehm, pistol in hand, should have saved the world is beyond ludicrous. But that she made her feelings on the whole matter public tells me that she thinks we all must agree with her.
Barnett's being offended that people laughed at her tells me just how habitual it has become for us to embrace or ignore the illogical, the non-factual, even the downright stupid, in the name of not offending anybody.
Yes, she's completely free to feel the way she does. She's got the right to speak up or quit over it if she wants, too. But that doesn't mean we have to agree with her. We are just as free to express an opinion on the matter as she is. If that opinion is expressed as laughter, so be it.
We are guaranteed the right to speak. We are not guaranteed there will be no consequences for what we say. In fact, the expectation of consequences is what restrains most people to basic civility.
And laughter is a consequence we hear far too rarely these days, mostly because we unwisely have declared it offensive on a par with the real menace in the world.