My grandmother on my father's side was an illiterate immigrant woman who lived in America for 68 years and never learned to speak English. She was also a heartfelt socialist, having experienced the full force of laissez faire capitalism in a cotton mill, 14 hours a day, six days a week.

So she knew, when World War II began, that it was a war of bosses fighting over how to split up the money.

Three of her boys joined. Two were drafted. Then, there were no more boys in her house.

The war winds blew her boys all over the world. She knew where her son in France was because she had heard of France. But Tinian? Burma? Truk? The Coral Sea?

No, her boys were lost. The bosses took them to fight.

"I don't know who told her," my father would say. "Maybe she saw a newsreel in a movie theater about the Rape of Nanking or the Germans in Poland."

"She couldn't read," my father said. "But she got the idea that the Germans and the Japanese killed babies."

"Babies," my father would say. "She had seven children of her own, and she'd been pregnant 13 times. She lost two stillborn sets of twins."

"I guess that was it," my father would say. "Because, once she started to believe the Germans and the Japanese killed babies, she wanted them all dead, and she thought us boys had gone overseas to personally put a stop to the baby killing."

My grandmother knew who she was, and she knew how she'd raised her boys. They wouldn't let anyone kill a baby, and they'd kill anyone who tried.

So, in scrambled America, you watch the Casey Anthony trial and maybe you say something to a friend about how someone deserves to die for killing that child.

For most of the history of this nation, cases like the Anthony one drew publicity, and more than one perpetrator of this kind of crime was dragged screaming from the precise arms of the law and left dangling from a telephone pole or a tree.

And, in general, men who looked like me did the lynching — long-headed, big-knuckled, angry-eyed white men. And, of course, we lynched hundreds of people for other reasons, too, reasons mostly having to do with the uncured disease of bigotry.

My grandmother, at 4-11, was far too small to join a lynch mob, but I don't think she would have minded if her husband had stayed out late to lynch a baby-killer. She'd have kept his dinner warm until he got home.

Certainty is a wonderful and a terrible thing. It storms ashore at Normandy, and it pulls the lynch rope.

And now, in an age when we breed babies like they were gerbils, when parenthood increasingly means making yourself happy first, who can stand with certainty and say the baby killer should die?

We've been on a 40-year drunk in this country, throwing down shots of unrestrained freedom until we're too hammered to believe anything with certainty.

If my hands did pull a lynch rope for a baby killer, what certainty would I be defending? The sanctity of marriage? Not worth it. Only gay people believe in marriage anymore. The purity of American motherhood? Sure, if motherhood is no more than pregnancy followed by labor. Or would I be defending the idea that American men will protect children? Try and say that without laughing.

You wanna hang somebody over this?

Hang yourself.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com