propaganda songs
July 18, 2006
I saw one of the women who had been involved in Jane: Chicago speak today, and it broke my heart again and again. First, that women were ever in such a position: that one’s choices, upon being fertilized, were reduced to 1) possibly fatal danger or 2) motherhood (these and only these); second, that people in this world are doing their best to see that that binary choice returns; third, that that reality is a legislative slip of the tongue away (one Mississippi). And fourth, that women could overcome their personal differences to make a localized yet meaningful change in others’ lives: that ordinary people could see around and through the system to the skills they needed to acquire, that they did not let their fear stop them from doing what they believed was right.
Though there is no grand narrative, no pattern, no meaning save the arbitrary granted wish, I want to make the most of my time breathing in this body. I want to make this incredibly fucked-up world a tiny bit better for at least a couple of other people. I want to do what I can.
And I will not let my fear stop me from doing what I believe is right (though I am not THAT bull-headed and I will compromise. I have my ethics, though, and I will stand by them).
Sometimes, though, I get very sad and tired. One of the women in the Jane documentary said something that resonated with me: that doctors had some training in professional distancing, which is something she’d never learned to do, and that eventually seeing all that suffering (no matter whether she had a part in ending it or not) began to bruise her.
I can’t remember a time I haven’t known evil like that, that I haven’t seen suffering.
Sometimes I wish I was better at distancing. Sometimes I get very tired.
Nothing is really binary, not truly. All those shades of grey like car exhaust, toxic. Exhale, inhale: everything gives you cancer, but there’s always a chance you’ll be the lucky one this time. In hope, fear. In fear, hope.
