You stopped and looked back
When, walking home from the party,
you stopped and looked back
were you making sure nobody was following you, or
hoping to see somebody approaching?
When you closed the door and turned the key
were you welcoming solitude, or
craving the world you left outside?
In the stone house in the suburbs,
were you cherishing the quiet isolation,
or missing the messy loud crowd of the city?
The sour-smelling dirty messy loud crowd
the intoxicating exhilarating
magnificent
crowd.
This so-called culture of life
Andrew Hinton writes a thoughtful and passionate post about George Bush’s first veto that will prevent the use of frozen embryos for stem cell research. In his post, Andrew questions where life starts, where life ends, and who decides it.
He also touches on the issue that I find the hardest to digest about this so-called culture of life:
This is a way for an administration that has championed so much death to doubletalk their way into being all about life, to hold onto their shredding political base by pandering to the ignorant, superstitious and misguided who keep putting them in office.
What does culture of life means for an administration that is perfectly fine with capital punishment, has started two wars, and at the present doesn’t seem particularly compelled to stop the killing of civilians (including children) in Lebanon? Why is the life of a fully formed human being worth less than that of a frozen embryo? Why is the concept of life so much more valuable than the reality of life?
It’s true, the practice of life is much less pure, innocent, and holy than the abstract concept of life. Real people live real lives, make mistakes, do stupid things, hurt, humiliate, threaten, and sometimes kill other people. Real people, differently from frozen embryos, do not symbolize the appealing concept of eternal life; they are born, grow up, get old, and die. They don’t represent the purity of the concept of life; they sweat, bleed, shit, smell bad, and get fat. Real life is a continuous dance with real death; growth is the other face of decay.
But real people also love, nurture, and protect other human beings. They are loved, nurtured, protected by other human beings. They miss other humans beings and they need closeness and physical contact. They are part of a net of relationships, human connections, and social exchanges. They line up in a temporal sequence of births and deaths for generations and generations and hold the memories of those who came before them.
Whatever philosophical reasoning or ethical believe we hold, we cannot dismiss the smelly, bloody, sweaty, and infinitely endearing nature of our messy life. This is the life that a frozen embryo, sadly, has never experienced and almost certainly never will. This is the life that we can and must protect.
There are a few things we can all agree on…
It’s not yet established with certainty whether Mr. Bush likes black people or not, but we know for sure that in the past he has declined several invitations to speak at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 2004, he defined his relationship with the NAACP as “basically nonexistent.”
But in this world everything changes, and today the President appeared at the NAACP for the first time since his election. The atmosphere was reserved and suspicious; several seats in the front rows were empty. The President had a much harder time than usual generating an applause. But then his audience unexpectedly delivered an enthusiastic endorsement of Mr. Bush’s message. When the President said: “And I understand that many African-Americans distrust my political party,” the crowd cheered and clapped in loud assent.