A bright, summery Memorial Day morning here in New England and I wake to birdsong, a messy kitchen, a sleeping household and a strong sadness at this very day’s disconnects.
How can it be so beautiful when we are to remember the bravery of service people lost? How can it be that this Memorial Day coincides with our country having just crossed the $1 Trillion mark for these two wars we are currently engaged in? We got into one under false pretenses and still, we don’t extricate. We got into another conflict and find ourselves mired and stuck. My little town—cutting teachers, cutting public services—spends $40,000 per day on these wars. And local artist Matt Mitchell quietly paints portraits of those who have served—One Hundred Faces of War Experience—he’s a third of the way through, and those images provide a very definite stark power, a reminder that we lose more than dollars or even limbs or even life, we lose a kind of faith through war. Regardless of whatever a soldier learns to counterbalance that, regardless of how a military can also bolster a nation back up, the horrors and wrongs that we call collateral damage leak one sort of human trust and that cannot be replaced for those who have had it stolen.
Can we talk about how willingly—because we did put ourselves into these wars—seeking or allowing for those realities is a disconnect to the values we hope to protect and uphold and do so without seeming unpatriotic and without seeming ungrateful for the larger than life sacrifices made?
Breeze rustles leaves, a sprinkler over-waters the neighbor’s grass and a giant air carrier booms overhead. Once it flies over, the birdsong and dogs’ barks become louder again.
Another disconnect: we’re protecting oil interests in the Middle East while off the Gulf Coast, the worst oil spill in US history continues basically unabated and without tenable remediation. I don’t think I could begin to write succinctly or effectively about the many ways our policies surrounding energy and oil—from production to environmental conservation to energy conservation to taxation—are not moving us from dependence upon oil to a new way of life that might be sustainable for us and our biggest Momma, the earth.
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On this bright beautiful day I woke up, like so many of my fellow reproductive justice supporting friends, remembering Dr. George Tiller, who was gunned down in his church lobby a year ago today. Painted by the right as an “abortion doctor” what he actually was isn’t that; he was a doctor committed to women’s rights, women’s choices, women’s equality and women’s agency. He was one of just two doctors left in this country willing to perform late-term abortions, and he did so under siege for years (by siege, I mean, constant threats to him and his coworkers, his clinic, his patients and his family).
I think it’s fair to say Dr. Tiller was a soldier and he served not a country but half the world; he served women.
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The disconnect with abortion rights is that by placing the issue into the context of an abstract “life” the way that abortion is presented again and again pits life against life, the woman/”mother” against fetus/embryo/”child.” Note that I do put mother and child in quotes, because a pregnant woman is not necessarily a mother—nor is an embryo or a fetus necessarily a child. Pregnancy has two undisputable features: one is that intention—how you determine its outcome—plays a critical part in how the experience goes and two is that left alone, a healthy pregnancy does end in childbirth, a process that is not immediate but takes a fairly lengthy period of time.
Take this to the extreme and you have the case of Sister Margaret’s excommunication from the Catholic Church. A senior administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, she served on the committee, which determined late last year when a 27-year-old mother of four in her third month of pregnancy presented with a serious complication called pulmonary hypertension that termination of the 11-week pregnancy was required, because the medical consensus continuation of the pregnancy put the woman’s life in grave danger. Thomas Olmstead, the bishop of Phoenix, ruled that Sister Margaret was “automatically excommunicated” because she assented to the abortion. In the mother and child fight, apparently the child always prevails (despite the fact that very likely neither would survive).
Nic Kristoff, in his column, shared part of an email sent by one of the hospital’s doctors about Sister Margaret: “She is a kind, soft-spoken, humble, caring, spiritual woman whose spot in Heaven was reserved years ago. The idea that she could be ex-communicated after decades of service to the Church and humanity literally makes me nauseated.”
Kristoff points to another glaring disconnect: “Let us just note that the Roman Catholic hierarchy suspended priests who abused children and in some cases defrocked them but did not normally excommunicate them, so they remained able to take the sacrament.”
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On this day of parades and barbecues and welcoming of summer’s bounty and slowed-down time, can we hold the happiness celebrations and long weekends and school’s out brings along with the hard questions? We won’t answer the questions today, but let’s promise to sit with the dissonances and begin to address them.
