So as much as I incite conversation, we're feeling the effects of Oxford here locally (it was in the county next to mine); there have been enough new threats to other schools in the surrounding districts that most of the districts (including mine) have cancelled school today.
Forget about the debates about gun control or cars or whatever. My personal struggle is I just can't comprehend what causes people to choose to act this way. Especially when it's kids - what can cause a kid to be so disenfranchised so they value the life of others - and their own life - so little? Where are their parents and supporting friends? How can I help my own kids deal with the fears this brings up? How can I help them be the kind of people that make friends with the outcasts?
Same thing with
Roe v Wade stuff* - if only the issue was
only about life and death of future children, or
only about women's rights. But because those things are linked by biology, we get a complicated mess where some political groups focus only on "what about the babies!" and don't consider the impact anti-abortion laws have on women, and other political groups focus only on "what about the women!" which has their own (more subtly dangerous, in my opinion) impacts on worldview and social structures. I think both views are missing the point - you can't sacrifice the rights of women
or the rights of future people.
I will call out the crowd here that is typically an ideological overlap between environmentalism and anti-anti-abortion. I can't comprehend the dissonance in ideas between "we have to save the planet for future children" coupled with the implied "but only for the children we want to have". That's the subtle danger in the pro-choice worldview that breaks my heart - it's the idea that we only have children we want, when we want them, on our own terms.
It pains me to know that there are women who feel they have no choice but to get an abortion, that their life will be so poor if they have a kid they didn't plan for or want right now, or they will be enslaved to their family or don't have the economic life they want. Life is so much more than that, and it's terrible that society has limited life in those ways. But that terribleness of society isn't enough, in my mind, to justify us literally choosing who has an opportunity to live and doesn't. On the flip side, any pressure (physical or, more often, emotional or economic) to get pregnant in the first place is abhorrent.
I have equal ire for the "what about the babies" crowd too, because usually that crowd is also anti-immigration, racist, and generally unkind to other groups. It's like they think that protecting (some) babies makes them righteous despite all the other terrible things they do. I can't get behind the laws or mere sentiment that says "oh you got an abortion, or support abortions, you should be ashamed and shunned." No, those women need to be loved.
Basically short story is: all these things roll up into the same core issue of "self first, above all others" and how that worldview implicitly and likely adversely impacts everyone who isn't self. Putting others first - the unborn, the oppressed woman, the angry teenager, the stranger, the person who you don't understand, the person with different skin color or language or favorite movies, the person who did you harm is damn hard but I think "putting others first" is really the better way that everyone is seeking to get out of society's messes.
It's so easy to say with unfounded confidence "you are wrong!" but it's so so hard to say "even if you are wrong, I will still be kind to you." And I struggle as much with that as anyone - am I willing to sacrifice being correct (because I do believe in absolute correct/incorrect) to be kind to people?
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4457922 times)