Sunday, November 5, 2017

The Travesty That Is Today's America

Imagine that you are a big girl in a society where everyone is struggling just for food and enough water, and you have no prospects to set you apart from anybody else in the struggle. Any skills you learned have no value because no one can pay you to use them and there are no raw materials. You can't afford to think beyond the struggle. Maybe you have a sick parent or brothers and sisters who depend on you. The only thing anybody will pay you for is sex, so you can only capitulate, get a dollar or two that way and make yourself available to other possible clients for their free-ranging ideas of sex. You get pregnant that way, for sure, and maybe you pick up a disease which you will have to live with till you die. There are no clinics and no one to go to for birth control. You or girls much like you commonly deal with ten or eleven pregnancies, if not surviving sons and daughters, before your reproductive system or your body wears out. Then those offspring, almost certainly, face a future of despair comparable to yours, whichever kids live to grow up.

This is the way recent U.S. policy has willed that life should remain for the world's poorest poor women in equatorial or sub-equatorial Africa and Asia. Every Republican president since Reagan has ruled that the vile A-word should be the crux guiding foreign policy as regards family planning assistance. If a clinic in a foreign country offers abortion, makes referrals for it or recommends it in any of their practice then no U.S. funds are allowed to go there. No more evil medical procedure, these officials rule, has been condoned through official channels than the A-word, which means the snuffing of the innocent life of an unborn child by the whim of the heartless mother. It's clear-cut and it's wrong and it speaks loudest of the innate evil in the souls of men and women in their procreative years, but particularly women. So we will not condone it by any sort of U.S. funding. That's the way the official Republican thinking goes, whatever many thinking Republican sympathizers may arrive at in their own judgment.

If we are religious or spiritually-inclined and believe that a soul is given to every mortal body at conception but admit that not all who are conceived are born (for any number of reasons) and that mortal life can under some conditions be little more than wretchedness, WHY ARE WE NOT WILLING FOR PREGNANT WOMEN TO GO FOR HELP IN TERMINATING--OR EVEN PREVENTING--PREGNANCIES THEY DID NOT WANT AND CANNOT HOPE TO RESULT IN A CHILD ABLE TO SURVIVE, FLOURISH AND BE WELCOMED INTO A PREDATORY, DESTITUTE SOCIETY?

If souls are eternal, better that they populate somebody in some time or place who can expect the community to value the person, where there is hope of some earthly reward. Let pregnant mothers be free to assess that and let's get on with OUR OWN BUSINESS, let's not mind theirs as if we knew anything about what they have to cope with. In this world approaching a population of eight billion people, why do we make policy that says more, endlessly more children are God's will? Do we believe that God's will is a squalor of wasted lives, wars, unmet need and destruction of water, air, soils and other living creatures we've been sharing the earth with because we should observe no limits on ourselves? We have our own sacred cows in the U.S. value system, apparently, and these are human embryos and fetuses.

Under the Trump administration, the Global Gag Rule, revoked by President Obama, came back in fuller force than ever under previous Republican eras, taking away funding for any form of health assistance including treatment for malaria, HIV, malnutrition and any and all family planning if the recipient organization wouldn't sign a statement that they never provide abortions or refer women elsewhere for them. So, how draconian, mean and ruinous to the whole human and earthly community have we wished to become in this disunited nation?

We are intelligent enough to know that any organism including the human that grows without limits hits limits, on its air supply, its water and its bodily territory. Only a cancer tries to grow forever and so it destroys the body it afflicts. How is American Christianity, the originating belief system in support of the U.S. Global Gag Rule, upholding God and the Lord Jesus Christ by imposing early death and misery on thinking, spiritual human beings in countries that have the least remaining resources to cultivate? 

It's not our role to judge that people--women especially--in other lands, of other religious backgrounds, are less holy than we are. Moreover why do the most sanctimonious U.S. Christians feel that God approves the using-up of what may be the most beautiful, diverse planet in the universe by ourselves collectively and our industry? Do we really choose depletion, extinctions and squalor in favor of money in wealthy people's bank accounts and the stock market? Yes?

The situation in which we find ourselves, and the U.S. system of values as it appears, makes me absolutely disgusted to be an American citizen. I would sooner, if I could, retreat into history and have some other identity from before there was a United States. I would rather that the United States had never existed, with some, truly democratically-governed nation in its place.