"Matthew 25"

While I'm keenly aware that abortion is none of my own personal damn business, and ultimately it's a matter of choice for a woman, what pieces like this one serve to do is simply remind people that in the meantime there's some truly horrid shit being done in our name. Even though it's much easier to terrorize pregnant women than take on the might of the military-industrial complex, I really wish they'd for once pick on someone their own size. Sadly, the cognitive dissonance can really kick in ignoring the death we 

deliver every day to other people in other countries: this piece calls into question the relativistic morals of the "pro-life" position. And of course, it's always the easy way to hold a belief way down deep inside where no-one will ever ever see or hear it.

Every sperm is sacred, Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.
- Terry Jones/Michael Palin

This hypocrisy of this disconnect is baffling - one wouldn't think the religious should have much say in the matter, having ceded the moral high ground when they wrapped themselves in the flag and lined up for the crusade. Now to be sure, there are religious organizations and groups that do work to end war (hell, even the Pope managed to get this one right, and also a big hat-tip to the efforts of these folks). Even though many choose to not participate in self-righteous cheerleading, but they are overshadowed and outshouted by more visible and vocal believers ... if they aren't just simply complicit in their silence. Religion, like most art, exists to give people sanctuary from just that sort of activism* or awareness of anything outside themselves.Now I'm always more than happy to be proven wrong. Next time one of these same church groups sponsors legislation to stop the war or pickets with signs about the evils of war, just let me know...

*note - a special example of distinction is one particular musician who's work I've long admired in terms of both technical proficiency and dimension of vision: Bruce Cockburn is one of the few artists who is able to execute his passionate beliefs with conviction and skill.

A theory is that if just a fraction of the passionate energy that go into these proselytizing political protests were instead spent on ending the everyday, wholesale destruction we visit upon others, maybe, just maybe something would change. But I guess for the most part it'll stay okay to blow the shit out of innocent children if they are A) already born and B) live somewhere else. And also C) there's profit. The sort of faux outrage on this issue reminds me of all the ranting about health care supposedly bankrupting the nation (and the accompanying anti-abortionist fits), when I distinctly remember hearing nothing, not a damned peep when America got its hard-on for war. Keep shoveling, it doesn't matter as long as someones making money: just remember: killing people = okay/health care = not okay. Oh but rest assured, there's no shortage of taxpayer funding to combat the Very Serious Problem of making sure our nation's men can stay hard in the face of adversity though.

Lastly, I always think about the ratio of how many pregnancies are unplanned to begin with: such casual disregard for conception of life might have something to do with the empty and reckless disregard we have for ending it.


"Not so! not so! kettle said to the pot; "'Tis your own dirty image you see;
For I am so clean -without blemish or blot- That your blackness is mirrored in me"

- "Maxwell's Elementary Grammar"1904