by Nate Feinberg

Created on: February 05, 2007   Last Updated: April 25, 2007

It's amazing how many parents disregard what their children say as the truth due to their age. Sure, some kids can have some extraordinary ideas, beliefs, and interpretations of some situation, but when to act on the words is a difficult subject to take on.

However, this work's focused won't be focused specifically on words alone. "Actions speak louder than words"; I don't know who first said that quote, but whoever did started a huge repitition of the quote.

Take the new movie Messangers for example.* In the movie(Spoiler caution: sorry!), the daughter witnesses a strange chain of events in a new house they enter. Supernatural, impossible things begin to happen; the staircase's guard-rail breaks and shifts to the side for no reason; pairs of decayed, deathly arms attempt to pull her through and to the ground; regular household items begin to shatter and fly around the room without any obvious provocation at all.

Now, please try and disregard the fact that this is in fact a movie, and that the supernatural is possible in a movie. Assume this is a real-life situation, and that you are the parents of this teenaged girl.

In the movie, the parents make an automatic accusation that the girl is just trying to get away from this house because she doesn't like being "in the middle of nowhere". Needless to say, this causes immense friction and frusturation within the parent-child relationship.

Now, some time after, she walks into an apparently uninhabited barn owned by the family. Of course some movie-fluff type stuff happens, but the point of the scene was that she finds a little boy crouching in a corner. At first, however, doesn't realize he's actually a decayed, zombie-like corpse, huddling in despair and anger. She walks over and asks cliche questions like if he's ok, etc. The boy turns around with his ice-like eyes and stares at her for some time. She freezes, and soon blacks out. The next thing she knows is that she's in the hospital with cuts and bruises that she doesn't know the origin of, aside from the obvious explanation: the boy.

Now, the parents and doctors take the immediate assumption that this was self-inflicted damage; obvious suicide-prone activity. Assume this is true; that these cuts and bruises and such were self-inflicted, and you don't know whether or not she knew what she was doing. She claims she saw these preposterous things that attacked her, and you can do anything but listen.

Until the problem is resolved at the end of the movie and the family

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