Roy Oswald, a leader at the Alban Institute, relates the following incident from his boyhood in rural Canada. As a young boy, Roy and his two older brothers often took a shortcut to school through an enormous thistle patch. In some places the prickly patches were 50 to 100 feet wide. The boys rarely wore shoes to school in the summertime, hence their dilemma: how to cross the thistle patch in bare feet. The option of taking the long way around and avoiding the thistles was quickly overruled. The only other option was to back up and run as fast as possible through the narrowest spot.

Roy recalls "running full speed in bare feet across 20 feet of prickly thistles, yelping in pain all the way. When the three of us reached the black soil on the other side, we would immediately hit the dirt a…