today was roe v. wade and planned parenthood v. casey DAY TWO in my constitutional law class. excruciating. there is a great comedy bit, i can't remember who it is (but a woman, obvs), where she says something about going into her gyno for a routine exam, and being so pissed off about all the demonstrators out front that she got an abortion to spite them, even though she wasn't pregnant. that's pretty much how i feel. at UNO, the demonstrators came out one day. they were bitching about planned parenthood (the place, not the concept), and brandishing six foot tall pictures of aborted fetuses. hard to look at? sure. but certainly also a cheap ploy, a gross-out tactic used by arrogant people so smug in their own moral superiority that they damn-near choke on it. i for one wish they would.
i don't know what i can say about this that hasn't already been said. it scares me they way our country seems to be turning toward the kind of fundamentalism that margaret atwood wrote about in "the handmaid's tale," all the while pointing fingers at the fundamentalists in other countries. i can't talk or think about this anymore, it's too frustrating for me.
one last note though. w and i watched the chilling movie "downfall" the other night, about the siege of the bunkers where hitler and his cronies were staying as the allies moved in. we had that discussion afterward, you know the one, where one person says something about how evil hitler is and the other one questions that conclusion. i thought, and even said after he made the comment, that he was going to give me the usual "mad-genius" colloquy. i should have known better, i'm not with this man for no reason, after all.
w was merely saying that one day it may become clear that all life of any sort is equally valued and sacred, that people who kill any living being will not be seen as any different than those who kill humans, that it may one day be seen as worse that living creatures were raised for slaughter. i don't know if it was his intention, but w really got me thinking about things.
i maintain that there is (here comes my atheism creeping in) no universal truth. for there to
be universal truth, i think there has to be acknowledgement of some over-being that is the keeper of said truth. i don't believe that there is such an over-being. i think that all truth or untruth is individual and filtered through our human eyes and psyches. the same, it would seem, must go for universal evil, in the way i was espousing it the other day. can something be objectively evil? i thought so a few days ago, but now i'm not so sure.
there are people in my conlaw class who think that abortions (and those who practise or receive them for any reason) are universally evil. i think they're wrong, but aren't both views just a reflection of the time and place in which we live? there was certainly a time and place when even religious people thought that abortion before "quickening" was okay.
i have been writing this post for over an hour. i have written and erased and written and erased and done it all over and over. i have other shit to do. thus the title of this post. and yes, i did write the title before the post. i know that these issues are a quagmire for me, and one i usually avoid. it's just especially acute this week and i DON'T debate about it in class cause i will slap a ho. ask my friend crOOked (remember that goddam college 101 class and all those little housewives in training spouting off about god raining down formula on all the poor little babes?).
