AUDIO: Independence Day, 2008

On this, the fourth day of July, in the year 2008, we find cause to celebrate our vices:

We dedicate this day to that declaration which decreed the end of our subjugation to tyranny and the beginning of our addiction to war; we revel in all 232 glorious years, and it is in commemoration that we unleash facsimiles of rockets and missiles and mushroom clouds into the air above us, to the hushed awe of the crowds huddled in the summer darkness, shivering with explosive thrill at the seductive whisper of our collective power.

We dedicate this day to our addiction to the flesh and bone and blood of our Mother; to $4 a gallon gasoline from the luxurious view afforded us from the windows of our SUVs; to the labor and sweat and crushed souls of those who toil for our convenience across oceans and earth, where, if we cannot easily see, no knowledge of modern slavery will penetrate to trouble our serene national psyche.

We dedicate this day to our Berlin border wall, to the 1,952 mile stretch of desperation and despair, to blind nationalism and xenophobia, because no one born outside these arbitrary borders, truly, can be completely human; we relish our corporate addiction to cheap labor and union busting, to salmonella-laced produce and lead-based toys and always low prices delivered with a brilliant yellow grin.

We dedicate this day to warrantless wiretapping with bipartisan immunity from prosecution, to spying on citizens in the event they should commit thought crimes and rebel; we dedicate this day to American fascism, to Big Brother government with none of the perks, to the Red Scare, to Black Lists and Do Not Fly; we dedicate this day to busting down doors, shoot first ask questions later.

We dedicate this day to the spiritual vacuum left in the wake of postmodernism, pining for the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus and Satan; we gnash our teeth and wail and cry because there is nothing left to believe in except, perhaps, that through war and waste and endless consumption, through wage slavery and sex trafficking and industrial abuse, through blind faith that all is well and a refusal to acknowledge the possibility that anything can and should be different, we will find salvation and we will not rot in Hell.

On this day we find cause to celebrate the occasion of our dependence, and we call ourselves free.

AUDIO: A Call To Arms

This is the Great American Scream, this is the sound of one million disenchanted voices waking from their fairytale slumber to see the devastation laid before them, the havoc and destruction wrought upon us by our fathers and our mothers and their fathers and mothers and each successive preceding generation — back to ancient times when the first woman alive plucked knowledge of right and wrong from the Kabalistic concept they call the Tree of Life, shortly before Manifest Destiny was decreed and Eden was paved over to make way for a Wal*Mart Superstore and a McDonalds, so no one knew what right or wrong was anymore, ever, anyhow.

This is the agony of separation, imaginary friends behind bars like the common thought criminals they are and the real kind virtually imaginary; this is the sound of grandma’s funeral or a dead pet or unrequited love combusting in the ashes of the WTC towers like your own private Hiroshima and that of an entire generation; this is the girl crying out beneath her lover’s expert hands as he manipulates her, contorts her with pleasure and anguish in ways she did not think possible until now; this is the pulse, the breath, the heartbeat, the collective sob, the universal gasp for air underwater; this is the voice that is better seen and not heard; this is ecstasy in anarchy, order in chaos and chaos in order; this is the What Would Jesus Do and Follow the Rules collapsing beneath the colossal weight of their own bullshit; this is a rape victim sentenced to 200 lashes for speaking up about it, this is 70¢ to a man’s dollar, this is fuck-me heels and miniskirts and lipstick and upraised arms with hairy pits brandishing smoldering bras in defiance of the natural order; this is the raised middle finger, the turned back, the Fuck You mingled with ecstatic cries of Fuck Me; this is suicide bombers and Jessica Lynch and Tim McVeigh and Malcolm X; this is the vacant lot of the American Dream, and it has been condemned, boarded up, demolished; this is We Don’t Need No Education remixed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; this is Yeats’ dream of WWIII slouching towards Iraq to be born; this is the thousand eyes of Moloch screaming without mouths, without words, and they are our eyes; this is the children of privilege being marched down the assembly line, realizing that the guillotine gleaming red with the life of every AIDs-infected starving Ethiopian child is still sharp and polished and hungry; this is a divorced single mother whose blood could stop cold in her veins and who could not pay a doctor to keep her from dying, while Congress issues orders to keep a woman who cannot drink or chew or swallow or move with no brain activity alive just in case, while a man’s teeth rot inside his face because nobody cares what happens to you if you don’t have a perfect white Hollywood smile, you might as well crawl into a ditch if you can’t find room at the inn or the shelter, you might as well die.
Read the rest of this entry »

AUDIO: Fairytales My Mother Told Me

When I was young, my mama told me, little girl, you can do, you can be whatever you please, and you can do anything that a boy can do, and you can be anything that a boy can be, and you can do it just as well and, maybe, even better. She told me, little girl, nothing in this world can ever stop you.

When I was young, my mama told me, little girl, fairytales do come true, and Prince Charming will come for you, and you can find true love that never dies. She told me, little girl, you can have faithfulness and fidelity, a perfect happy family, if you are good and follow all the rules.

When I was young, my mama told me, little girl, God has a plan, though it cannot be seen or felt or understood by man, and He will always forgive you and love you no matter what you do (at least if you do nothing really bad). She said, He wants us all to be together for eternity, so if you do all that I say he said, maybe when we die in Heaven we can see each other, always be with one another, again.

I want to live in a world where abortion is just another medical procedure, about as morally-charged as treating a cold or getting your wisdom teeth removed.

Does a tumor have a right to life? It’s the same thing. It’s a clump of cells that siphons off your body’s resources so it can grow. Sure, sometimes a fetus is a wanted parasite, welcomed, even, and I have no issue with that. That’s great. But even when it’s wanted it can take a toll. The body sees a baby as a foreign invader and does everything it can to try to kill it off. Plenty of fertilized eggs don’t even implant. (If we take conception as the moment life begins it means lots of sexually active women have a miscarriage without even realizing it.) A tumor is alive. It has human DNA, even.

The fact is, especially early-on, it’s something that happens all the time, purposely or no. And the baby’s not really a living, thinking thing in anything other than the strictest sense — a glob of cells the size of a pencil eraser. Can you tell me removing an unwanted embryo at that stage is comparable to murder? (As an aside, I think that comparison really minimizes the gravity of murder. A person who has lived years of life is different from something that’s existed for a few weeks or months and hasn’t even experienced anything yet.) It’s not a big deal at this stage. I really believe this.

This is not a “callous” attitude and it’s not disrespect for life. I have an immense respect for all life, which is why I’m anti-war and against the death penalty and try to buy cruelty-free meat and won’t kill a freaking mosquito if I don’t have to, for god’s sake. I have respect for the life of the woman carrying the fetus. I have respect for that woman’s autonomy. And that is why I say it’s not a big deal. People kill bugs all the time and I wish they wouldn’t and it’s something I don’t do, but it’s not a big deal so I don’t try to pass legislation telling them that killing living things just because they’re “pests” is wrong and they can’t do it. Because if you don’t swat that fly, a spider will eat it or something anyway. Everything dies. Small lives are not worth more than large lives, and the converse, respectively. All life is worth immeasurably much. But it’s also not the end of the world when something dies, either, though it can feel like it.

Death is not the worst thing that can happen. Our fear of our own mortality is what makes us feel it is. If we accept that all things die, that we will die, one more death upon the billions this world is built on doesn’t seem so awful. Torture concerns me. Disregard for human rights concerns me. Destruction of the environment concerns me. Injustice concerns me. Rape concerns me. Abuse concerns me. Oppression concerns me. Genocide and murder concern me.

Against those things? A woman deciding she doesn’t want to dedicate the rest of her life to caring for another creature doesn’t really phase me. Some people can’t or don’t want to take care of pets. I respect that decision and encourage them not to purchase one. Having a child is a much heavier and deeper responsibility with lasting repercussions that impact generations of lives. I strongly encourage some people not to have kids, ever.

Mind you, I know it’s a slippery slope, and that’s why I’m not placing conditions. I don’t think one can be pro-choice with conditions or caveats. As long as the thing is still in a woman’s body, I support her right to do whatever the hell she wants with it. I don’t care how far along she is. There are circumstances that sometimes prevent a woman from getting an abortion until it’s too late, until after the point when it’s no longer legal, when their intention was never to carry it to term. I think these women should not be punished due to factors which prevented them from aborting sooner. Some people will cut off at a certain date, when they think abortion is no longer permissible, and I think this is usually arbitrary. It’s often based on exactly when that particular person thinks an embryo is human enough for its death to qualify as murder.

I think an embryo’s always human. (Now, when it becomes a person, that’s debatable.) To deny that would be silly. And abortion is always killing a living thing, but I don’t see why that’s a huge issue given the undeniable realities of physical existence — living things always die. (We cannot live without killing. Even vegans eat plants. Even if we could invent a machine to synthesize food that’s never been alive, chances are it would have an environmental impact. There’s no way around this. As far as I’m concerned, there doesn’t need to be. Curing any disease is killing something, usually millions of microscopic somethings.) Life isn’t perfect and it’s not lasting and it’s really not as huge a deal as people make it out to be. Life at all costs is a short-sighted philosophy that ignores, I think, the impact of what’s really important: quality of life.

Living life by a rigid standard of ethics, denying relativism and pragmatism entirely…it may survive some philosopher’s purely logical standard of what is absolutely morally acceptable, but what is right is not always what is Absolutely Good. Nothing can ever be perfect. Utilitarianism isn’t any better a standard than this, either, and neither is hedonism, so I’m not endorsing either. I just think what is right depends. It depends on the situation, the circumstance, the people.

All we can do is what causes the least suffering, if in fact such a thing is feasible or practical. If not, we’re not perfect and we’re not all-powerful. We just are. We’re animals with an inflated sense of self-worth and our impact on the universe around us. If a God existed, would ze care, really, what we do and do not do? Does ze care about morals and ethics, if ze is really all-knowing, unconditionally loving, all-powerful? I doubt it. Everything can be forgiven. Better yet, mistakes in an absolute moral sense don’t need to be forgiven. There’s nothing, in a great cosmic sense, wrong with them.

We participate in and condone killing every day and it’s not in the sense of cold-blooded murder, it just is. Why is this any different? There is no reason it should be different that doesn’t buy into the idea that humans are inherently superior to animals, plants, bacteria. And I honestly don’t think we are. This attitude of mine is only a disregard for life if you accept that smaller lives don’t matter. As I don’t…what’s the problem? Where is the moral dilemma?

As for my unconditional support of choice, don’t give me that I-support-abortion-but-not-as-birth-control bullshit. What else is it? It’s a form of birth control. Did you mean to say “in place of contraception”? And if so, why? What about women who can’t take hormonal birth control (my sisters, my mother, me)? What about women who can’t afford it (again, were I in a position to be having penis-in-vagina sex, probably me)? What’s the litmus test here to see if a woman is deserving? If she used multiple forms of birth control perfectly and they all failed? It’s okay then? Is it only okay once? If birth control fails twice in ten years is that okay?

You can’t know another’s circumstances. Don’t judge. It’s not up to you to decide. The choice, in all likelihood, has absolutely nothing to do with you. Keep your nose out of it.

And if it is because a woman just didn’t take precautions…just because she doesn’t want a child, even if she could afford to care for it… So? Why is a woman obligated to become a mother? Why is anybody who does not want a child for any reason obligated to have one? Aren’t there enough people in the world? Do we need more? Why is this an issue, other than as a form of control over women’s bodies, women’s lives?

I want to live in a world where a woman’s decision to have an abortion is nobody’s business. I want to live in a world where anti-choice attitudes are not the accepted norm and are instead a radical fringe philosophy that normal people find horrifying. I want to live in a world where abortion is cheap, easy to access, and available whenever a woman needs one.

That is not the world we live in now, no matter what the anti-choice propaganda says.

I’m not in a good mood, and I’m just musing and venting. I do not want to debate this, and this post is not an invitation to debate. Thank you.

All right, a serious post.

My family has never really emphasized Easter. That’s the thing with growing up Mormon: Easter is not a big thing in the Church. Mormons claim to be Christian, but they only occasionally ever talk about Jesus. The Bible is a sort of secondary document to the Book of Mormon and Jesus has almost nothing to do with anything.

So it wasn’t until I was about 16 or so that I realized Easter is a huge deal for most Christian denominations, being as how the entire symbolism of the ordeal is central to any real Christian faith. Easter could go by without me even noticing. I’d hardly even thought about the symbolic value because when we were Mormon, no one ever really emphasized it. We gave Jesus the briefest of lip-service and then went back to talking about our religious plans for world domination and our self-inflicted persecution complex and that kind of thing. (Okay, most religions, to be fair, have both those characteristics.) I think the Mormon Church is probably the only “Christian” church where you can go for weeks at a time without anybody mentioning anything about Christ.

But this isn’t about the Mormon Church.

So…Easter. Until a few years ago, I’d never even really thought about it. I had a dim atheistic awareness that it was important for some reason. It’s only been recently that I’ve actually understood who Jesus was (allegedly), what he said, and why, because, growing up, even though we supposedly followed him, there was a suspicious lack of any information about the subject.

People may sometimes think I have a problem with Christians, but that’s not entirely true. If the only thing that one had to do to call oneself a Christian was to accept and live by Jesus’ peaceful and generally unobjectionable central philosophy, I’d be proud to be one. Can I argue with the message that everyone deserves to be treated well despite real or imagined flaws, that everyone is deserving of dignity and kindness, that violence is bad, that charity is good, that compassion, even for one’s enemies, is a virtue? Obviously not. But I’ve met very, very few “Christians” who I think have any real claim to the label.

The problem is that Christianity, as it stands, brings a lot of baggage which, far as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to do with the central figure of the religion. I strongly feel that Jesus probably had very little to say about Heaven or God, embellished or altered accounts of his teachings in the New Testament aside — but to be properly Christian, in most denominations, one must adhere to a very specific and narrow definition of God, when, like Buddhism, I don’t really think that the principles of kindness and responsibility for one’s actions and basic human decency really need to be rooted in the concept of a symbolic being. Why does anyone have to have a condescending paternalistic figure to articulate what seems like a generally good idea? (Why, if I were a cynic, I’d feel that the only reason to add the concept of Yahweh into anything would be to validate the control of manipulative hierarchical organizations over society.)

But I think Easter is an important holiday. I think it is important to remember.

This message of peace and acceptance and love…it was so radical, at the time, that a man was killed for it. Simply for saying that everyone should be treated justly, that rich men are not any better than poor men, men better than women, anyone intrinsically better than anyone else. That we are not our parents, and that the sins of our parents should not reflect upon us. That we should love everyone as ourselves, even our enemies, and extend to them all basic human courtesy and recognize that it is not our place to judge. That we are always in control of our own actions, and that those actions should never hurt anyone else, even if that person has hurt us. I think it is, at its heart, a very powerful and empowering philosophy about personal responsibility and respect. And this message was so frightening to the people in power that they had to have him killed.

And yet, two thousand years later, nothing changes. Men are still killed for this very basic and, as I said, fundamentally unobjectionable message. All Martin Luther King, Jr. did was follow the basic tenants of his faith, simply adapting the messages of his prophet to modern-day America, and he died for it, too.

I think there’s something very wrong with the world that this is still the case, and I have the feeling that Christ, if he could or can see what has become of his words, would disapprove. More than disapprove, really, though I can’t think of a word that describes exactly how awful it is that his message has been twisted into one of hate, war, and oppression. Everything he spoke against, his followers have done in his name. Not all of his followers, obviously, but far, far too many.

So, Christian or not, I hope we all can recognize Easter for what it really is, and not for what it has become.

For me, these two topics are inextricably linked. Obviously, there is the moral component that provides the foundation for the belief that there is imbalance in the world which must be corrected; whether one is religious or not, human rights are essentially and necessarily a moral value. There is no other justification for the idea of natural rights, nor do I think there needs to be. Perhaps moral justifications are not entirely defensible using logic, though I suppose one can turn to evolutionary psychology and explain that, as social creatures, it is in the best interest of everybody for all people to be treated with equal dignity, but that rings as disingenuous to me. When we need to philosophically or biologically justify acting in a decent manner, I think the point has been missed, though I suppose it makes for an interesting exercise in thought. However, how one approaches or interprets the issue is a personal matter.

The spiritual aspect of my feminism is much deeper than merely a guiding sense of right and wrong. Though I hesitate to assign myself a particular set of religious dogma, or, really, to be labeled in any area, the ideas I like best and fall most in line with are those of Buddhism. (And, ideally, I think, the same philosophies are also at the heart of the teachings of most prophets; the difference is that Buddha never said anything about needing a God.)

If I can be said to believe in God at all, it is a blind God. It is not a being, not a consciousness, at least not in any sense of the word which implies desires or wants or direction. It has no will of its own other than simply to be, to exist, and therefore favors no particular parties and bears no malevolence or benevolence to anyone in particular. And this is because I believe in no other divine motivating force behind the universe than the universe itself. I think the need to personify and symbolize things is understandable, but ultimately only gives rise to confusion and conflict. Perhaps abstract ideas are harder to understand, less convenient to explain, but they are also simpler and make more sense once one has a grasp of them. This kind of pantheism doesn’t really conflict with any other system of belief, because they can all be explained and incorporated into it. (This does not go both ways, of course, because faith in one particular personification of the divine usually precludes a belief in any other, which I think is part of the problem of using symbols to begin with. Mutual incompatibility of belief leaves no room for common ground, though a cynic might say it’s certainly a convenient way to perpetuate the ancient tribal survival-of-the-fittest mindset, keep the population in line ideologically, and generally control every aspect of people’s lives with relatively little effort. But someone wouldn’t start a religion just to control people, would they?)

I believe that God is just, and in the idea of karma. This is only because, as every being is a divine being, as every creature or substance arises from the same source, when one hurts another, one hurts oneself. Equal and opposite reactions don’t have to be limited to the realm of Newtonian physics. Realistically, we are all made of the same atoms and particles and charges in different and temporary, constantly changing arrangements. There’s no clear delineation on the subatomic level between anything; it’s mostly just empty air, infinite space that gives the illusion of a physical boundary from a wide enough perspective. Most of an atom is simply that: empty. There is just enough bound together within it in order to allow what seems to be a unit to form. And, essentially, on the quantum level, everything is simply part of a shifting tapestry of charged particles. We’re all part of the same vast sprawl of loose energy, frozen just enough to form into physical mass.

Whether or not one believes literally in the idea of reincarnation, I think the idea of rebirth is real enough to justify it as a useful metaphor. All matter is eventually recycled. One thing dies or decays and other life is nurtured by the same matter, up through the food chain. No energy is ever essentially lost, it simply shifts in form and configuration. (There’s entropy to account for, I know, but that’s another topic altogether — so I’m going to be general and gloss over that, for now.) We are also the sum of our genetics, and our culture. None of us is a completely new and original being; we all come from somewhere, and inside our cells we hold the lives of thousands of years of ancestry. All death creates life, as food or fuel, as natural selection, as written or spoken history. Rebirth is used in the Buddhist sense not simply to mean the reincarnation of a particular consciousness, but, at the most basic level, this vision of the universe, as a creative cycle of destruction and disintegration in order to form something new.

This in mind, I think it is, therefore, absolutely necessary (for me) to adopt a feminist position. Everything is, broken down to its constituent elements, essentially part of the same thing. This is why I cannot accept any other position than that, though everyone and everything may be a minor variation on the same universal energy, everyone, by virtue of being a part of this system, deserves to be treated equally, to be allowed the same rights and dignity. Though we do not live in a universe where it is possible for life to be sustained without deriving energy from other life, in the process destroying and assimilating it, this does not mean that it is desirable, justifiable, or right that one group of people should always oppress another in order to survive and have the advantage. This hurts all parties involved, and is the essential injustice in any hierarchical system of oppression. This is also why feminism must fight not only sexism, but racism, classism, and a host of other discriminatory prejudices based on physical or social characteristics.

We are not all the same. We do not all have the same resources, abilities, or needs. But we are all similar enough that we deserve the opportunity to express our abilities to the fullest extent, and to have all our basic needs met. It is only when allowed to exist in this state, able to express our potential, whatever it is, that we can give our life meaning and express our ultimate purpose. Our purpose is ours alone to decide and define, and it is different for everyone, but what is important is that it must be ours — not altered or limited by anyone else.