Being Pro-Life

Being Pro-Life starts with you, as an individual, and the choices you make. From there it spreads out to your friends and family, to your church, and to your community. It has always been about community activism and giving people information and options to make choices. Being Pro-Life is about loving other human beings and respecting not only their innate and biological life, but the metaphysical workings of their agency. 

When life begins isn't important to these beliefs, only what we do is important. If we are allowing others full access to their agency with the knowledge to use it properly, we are being true to the cause. When we stray from that notion, we stumble and fail. 

The moment we believe the Federal Government can do a better job of taking care of our friends and neighbors than we can, is the moment we can no longer lay claim to being Pro-Life. I think John Koster, Richard Mourdock, Todd Akin, Paul Ryan and others are probably having to give their anti-choice notions some thought now. Indeed, I hope the entire Republican Party is thinking about it. 

I personally believe it played a role in them losing the Senate and the White House. 

You can't be anti-choice and a fiscal conservative. It takes money to shake down dealers holding black market oral contraceptives and to kick in the door of every benevolent doctor giving a 12-year-old incest victim an abortion. Worse, this is the last way most police officer want to spend their time. Think! Do you want your community, your church leaders, and yourself responsible for spreading the Pro-Life message? People that really want to be there? Or men with guns that don't? 

Do we really want the Federal Government interfering with a pregnant cancer patient's agency, while she decides whether to fight for her life for her other two kids, or risk all and carry to term? Would you rather have benevolent friends, family, church/community leaders involved, or the Federal Government? 

Hint: The Federal Government tend to deploy heavily armed law enforcement professionals and lawyers with political ambitions to enforce the law. 

The Federal Government can't even balance a checkbook, do we really want them playing doctor with our wives, daughters, aunts, mothers, sisters, cousins, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens? I think the message to the GOP and the Anti-Choice movement this election cycle was clear. These "Sanctity of Life" and "Personhood" pieces of legislation that have been pushed unsuccessfully since 1995 need to just stop. Put simply, we're wise to it, and we don't want it, push your radical views to your constituency some other way. 

If you want to be Pro-Life, just do it, don't try to legislate it, quantify it, or put it into a legal context. Anyone with a true devotion to their fellow human, derived from their maker or otherwise, knows that doing so is to invite folley and to see one's beliefs cheapened by a soul-blackening political machine. 

If we don't support and love our fellow humans in spite of the choices they make, we are cheapening the significance of having a choice in the first place. Do not erode the greatest gift that comes with life by supporting people who would foster Federal control over the lives of others. These people are not true advocates of the Pro-Life movement, not true fiscal conservatives, and have utterly lost their way. 

Washington Post Social Reader = Evil

For those of you who still insist on using the Washington Post Social Reader on Facebook as a means to consume news - I present the following for you to consider. Yes, things like this can end up in the newsfeed of your friends, family and coworkers who currently have you subscribed.

Friends don't let friends use the WPSR!

I submit that linking the article in your status update is dumb and messy because Facebook made it that way, but at least you are in control of what people subscribed to your feed see!

Quiet

Noise is marketed, packaged and shipped like so many other things in this world. It's hard to go anywhere without finding it in high quantity and low quality. Movies and television shows are just orchestrated noise with some expensive visuals synchronized to play along behind it.

To that end, I'm making a new commitment to silence. I think it's an important virtue that so many people fail to exercise effectively and consistently. People think it takes courage to speak up, and sometimes it does. It takes wisdom to know when to shut up.

So, do not spread the word. Do not tell anyone about this new movement I'm starting, and certainly don't talk about it.

Just be quiet. Thank you.

Occupy Wall Street Movement, and the Police

Photo via Flickr and probably from these folks. (Still trying to find out who took it.)

I don't troll the internet looking for video of police beating, shooting or otherwise harming protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street Movement. You don't have to, it's starting to get common enough that it's everywhere. I'm beginning to think that US policy makers, mayors and police chiefs don't think this will spiral out of control; that something like the LA Riots can't happen again in the United States.

As more people drop below the poverty line and European countries continue to engage in the same financial brinksmanship we have, the situation gets even more dire. People are getting desperate, and they are tired of not being heard. I don't even agree with half of what the Occupy Wall Street movement espouses, but I 100% sympathize with them now that police departments are acting outside the confines of the law to suppress these people.

Full disclosure: My father's been a member of Law Enforcement virtually my whole life, so I'm not making these comments out of any bias for or against the Police. I've seen what the average police officer is capable of... the same thing any other human being. The problem is that they don't have room to make mistakes in a world where one in five people have a smart phone capable of shooting high definition video and sending it to the internet in two taps of the touch screen.

I doubt the police officers responsible will ever be held accountable. Right now, something like that would make the national news, and that's something no town or police department wants. The Police have already put the movement into the mainstream and are threatening to give it a sort of legitimacy that get's attention without solving any of the larger problems.

Click this...

...and this...

While people are looking at disgruntled college kids getting kicked around by the police, kids that might be their own, focus shifts from the real problem. I believe that many people that bought a house without putting 20% down, bought things they didn't need on credit, and took out student loans instead of looking for work outside their home town, are just as much to blame as the banking industry for what's happening in the US. That said, I believe that the Americans who engaged in these unwise financial decisions have suffered, and dearly, for those choices.

The Banking Industry hasn't paid the price for their participation, suffered crippling regulation, or been seriously investigated by any government entity responsible for protecting the public from those actions. On the contrary, they've been rewarded and given a pass by our government and allowed to continue on using the same tactics they used before. The US Government has passed new legislation, but none of it has any teeth or means of enforcement.

The banks can pretty much just ignore it.

I feel badly that the Police are left to bear the brunt of the people's anger over this. Protecting a populace from themselves and a criminal element is at least a noble pursuit most of the time. Getting paid overtime to protect the interests of soulless corporations and policy makers too blinded by the money flowing into their reelection campaign funds? Yeah, that would make me question what my oath and my badge stood for if I were a member of Law Enforcement.

As a citizen I don't know what I'd do if our own tiny Occupy movement came under attack in this way. It'd get pretty personal, and I don't think I'd sit by and watch the police take those kinds of actions in my town. I can only imagine how the people in Oakland must feel, and that's really the crux of the problem with the police taking violent action against the protesters.

The flip side is that the protesters need to make sure what they are doing is as legal as possible and that any laws they disobey be done in a civil manner. Using the cause as a front to traffic illegal substances, provoking the police needlessly, or causing local businesses to suffer will hurt the Occupy movement. So far, this has been a battle for public opinion, and if the Occupy folks continue to be merely civilly disobedient, they might have a chance.

Organized Religion & Fiction

I've largely avoided addressing religion in any of my fictional works. I've always constructed complex belief systems to serve the same function in their place. I've tried to give the protagonists and antagonists powerful ethical and personal reasons for their actions during the course of the story without any particular real world faith being involved.

In outlining a book I intend to write in 2012, I haven't had that same luxury. I will have to include certain elements of real world religions in the story because so much of it is told with our modern world as a backdrop. It's forced me to confront a lot of my own demons with regard to organized religion.

When entering into any sort of discussion about the benefits one finds among the fellowship of a particular faith, people are very quick to point out how they personally benefit. They basically imply that they gain access to celestial benefits everyone else is bereft of because they don't jump through the same hoops they do. They are essentially "better" than other people and derive a great deal of dubious personal worth to that end.

There is rarely mention of how they are able to access opportunities to do good in the temporal realm, and if there are, it's an afterthought. Worse, serving one's fellow man is generally a commandment one is expected to accept blindly because obedience is better than comprehending one's personal agency. For this reason, organized religion has little that appeals to me.

I'm not sure how being part of a traditional religious organization will grant me the contrivances one needs to aid others more than worshipping privately would. I see many of the intrinsic benefits one finds in such organizations, but I also see the long shadow such institutions cast. Looking around our once great nation, there is little benefit in supporting huge monolithic organizations these days, and even less in giving them money.

Then there is all the pseudo-social hoops one must jump through to gain acceptance into religious institutions. Honestly, being a creative person, I already spend enough time worrying about getting the perfect stranger to like and appreciate what I do. Mixing that with my desire to worship seems like a bad plan. I don't need the temporal body of a religion to tell me I have worth and a purpose. These are things I can just as easily provide myself, at no additional charge.

Clearly, I have strong opinions on the issue.

That said, I do not want my fictional works to become a soap box or platform for my views on organized religion. I don't think it would serve others, or my story, in doing so. In trying to be objective, it's made me realize a lot of things about myself and how I quantify faith.

I do tend to make my works something of a message about how important a person's agency is. Preserving one's own ability to choose while infringing no one else's is paramount to seeking Righteousness and the preservation of Justice. Both of those concepts, I believe, are intrinsic and require no validation on the part of men, Gods, or authors of fiction.

Communicating that same message in a fictional setting possessing elements of real world religions, will be a difficult challenge. I already have thousands of words worth of content collecting dust within previous attempts to do so collecting dust. Hopefully my latest attempt will be different.

I think that if I were to push my views in a work designed for commercial consumption I would be just as bad as the religious institutions I try to hold myself separate from. I do want people to know it is equally fine to practice one's faith in private or in the public forum that is organized religion provided they are doing so with their eyes wide open. Of course, the outcome of that choice isn't as important as how you live with and apply it.

Both require that you seek your own ways to be righteous in the world, and as much as it is promised, neither can really guarantee any celestial reward. Doing good while preserving your own agency and the agency of others is a reward unto itself and should be done as a matter of course relative to our very human condition. There need be no promise of ethereal blessings or heavenly protection. Relying on your own power to choose should be enough to navigate our temporal world.

It's easy to communicate this on my blog, but not so easy via a fictional work. It's easier when I take myself out of the equation and cease to worry about being commercially successful or what people will think about me when they read my work. Of course, my Twitter account does nothing to aid me in this endeavor. ;-)

Vinnie's Warriors Fundraiser

Thanks to everyone who showed up and helped out.

I hope they find a cure soon.

http://komenboise.org/ (Clickorz)

My Team: Battling for Boobies - HELP ME FIGHT BREAST CANCER (Clickorz)

Thanks.

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