Here’s the thing: I wish there were no bogeymen in the world, I really do — the same way I wished there were no monsters and no Wolf Men.

Way back when, when I was a naïve, dreamy child of ten, my favorite song was John Lennon’s Imagine.  Weekends I would play that groovy, far-out record like crazy, singing at the top of my lungs.  And I wasn’t just paying lip service, either — I was an obedient disciple, a true-blue dyed-in-the-wool believer who stood ready when the spirit moved to share the gospel according to John.  Many were the times I held my eldest niece hostage to the good news, driving her nuts with my tone-deaf, teary repetitions…  Round and round I would go, matching revolution for dizzy revolution my staticky ultra-seventies’-style turntable.

Trouble is, unlike Lennon, I was the only one. My flair for running in circles aside, to my way of thinking it was my niece who was loopy, not me. What was the matter with her, anyway — and with all those matter-of-fact grown-ups who kept peering into my bedroom and squinting like I had two heads? Didn’t they get it? This guru-god with the goofy round gold-rimmed glasses knew the way. He was the (sha)man, man, the definitive hippy. Woman was the world’s slave — and peace? Well, everybody knew she was just a poor kid who couldn’t get a break.

Back then I was serious. I couldn’t understand why all those mad grown-ups running round loose in the world didn’t see what I saw. Of course war was bad. Were they insane? I mean, wasn’t it obvious? Did we really need to spell it out?  Shouldn’t they be taking it for granted people aren’t supposed to go running around massacring each other? What in the world was wrong with them?

But then a funny thing happened on the way to eighteen: my body rebelled.  I grew up, too. The metamorphosis didn’t take place overnight — I didn’t suddenly become a monster the way the Wolf Man did. I didn’t go to bed one evening a human being, then wake up the next morning flat on my back with cockroach-legs flailing. Instead, I watched in helpless horror as little by little, day by day, inch by inch, I turned into the enemy: I became my mother.

But that’s what growing up is, isn’t it — a slow, methodical, ruthless strangling of innocence. With each new disappointment, each fresh failure, each unresolved conflict, I learned the hard way that life is loss — from the moment we’re born the dying begins. I tried hard to imagine the world being the way I wanted, but it kept on being the way it was — it kept on doing the same old things it always did, and grown-ups kept on acting like grown-ups. The more time I spent daydreaming, the more time the world spent doing. I found precious little in common between Lennon’s imaginary world and the real one I lived in. Against my will, I learned the meanings of adult words like existential and angst, and Kierkegaard became God — not just another dopey grown-up with an impossible last name.

And some of those adults were insane. The “real” world was every bit as full of the same megalomaniacs and head-cases as the rendered one I read about in literature. In that lofty alter-world, Hamlet drove himself crazy with second-guessing, Othello fell for Iago’s line, and Oedipus, after committing parricide, gouged out his eyes. And then there were the outright villains, like Medea who murdered her babies, and those whose orotund names clashed at the crossroads of history and myth, like Cassius and Brutus, immortalized by Shakespeare for their brutal betrayal of Julius.

Studying the great tragedies taught me, to a degree life could not, how to accommodate misfortune — how to weave into my worldview a healthy skepticism such that hope, buoyed by cautious optimism, could still survive. By this adjustment, I avoided despair and the paralysis that goes with it. In a world where high expectations meet untimely and devastating ends, literary tragedy schooled me in the politics of reality. And this realpolitik is as old as tragedy itself, as ancient as civilization. One must either adapt to the human dilemma or go daffy. And no one — not peaceniks, not well-intentioned “human shields,” not well-heeled schoolgirls with wishing pennies wedged smilingly into their loafers — can escape the primal human need to make this uneasy appeasement with the way things are.

Hamlet is the archetype who most speaks to the twentieth-century mindset, to its predilection for severe and incapacitating “analysis paralysis.” He fathered the contemporary hand-wringing and pathological self-doubt that inform much of modern moral relativism. He was, above all, a man of reflection, not of action. But by thinking too long, he fretted away his hour on the stage — and when at last he took arms, it was too late: everybody including his beloved Gertrude joined him in a jacuzzi of blood.

So, in a weird, roundabout way, every time I see those protesters waving their buoyant placards and chanting, “Give peace a chance,” I’m reminded of Hamlet and Othello and poor blind Oedipus. I remember Medea and Cassius and Brutus and Julius, too. I imagine Hamlet having his happy ending, Othello taking Desdemona’s word for it, and Oedipus getting that long-overdue radial keratotomy. I imagine John Lennon unfazed by Mark David Chapman’s bullet.

And I imagine I’m the Queen of England, too, or at the very least, the new Di. (Sigh.)

Here’s the thing: I wish there were no bogeymen in the world, I really do — the same way I wished there were no monsters and no Wolf Men. But Wolf Men really do exist — and worse still, they don’t die: they have to be destroyed. I really didn’t want those hard-headed cops to shoot Lawrence Talbot (and to this day I recoil when they do) — he was, after all, just another hapless grown-up who had begun life innocently enough, as a good kid with bad luck. But the common weal, the preservation of peace, exacted his particular death as its price. Talbot had to die, so others could live. And not just live, but live free — free of fear, free of terror, free of horror. It took horror to end horror. Peace was purchased with pain.

And good, sadly, is all too often born out of bad.

We can’t just sit back and let the Larry Talbots of this world run amuck. We, like those mad Brit Bobbies, have to do something, before it’s too late.

Even Henry Hull, The Werewolf of London, knew there was no getting around this. As he lay dying, he acknowledged his killers’ wisdom: “Thanks for the bullet; it was the only way.”