PETDM 14
this is harder than it looks.
it would be so easy if there weren't so much i want to talk about, and if my brain would stay awake long enough to actually help me make coherent posts.
1) tammy212 has better posts than I about the Health and Human Services "conscience rule". Deadline for HHS to decide is 10 days away now; Planned Parenthood Petition is here.
2) I love it when one sentence in a book opens the world tenfold for me. From The Wild Swan (my find from San Francisco last week) these sentences- just a bit of background information setting up Andersen's first round of travels as an adult: The Germany of independent states through which Andersen passed on his first visit was to be transformed within his lifetime. The Holy Roman Empire with its three hundred and ninety-six principalities, ecclesiastical states and free towns had been completely reorganized by Napoleon in 1806. After his defeat it was found impossible to restore the old order[...]
Which both reinforces that even in the known and incomplete history of the North American continent (about which, between Native American studies and Chicano/Latino Cinema, I am being given new points of view) there are orders and orders which came and went before Europe came; some of which is recorded, still, in the oral histories of the people still surviving and some, did we have eyes to see, in the geography and ecology of the continent itself.
3) I bought Miss Sarajevo. For a lot of reasons- because I have a good friend who is becoming a director of documentaries. Because people I admire and respect are involved in bringing his bookFools Rush In to the screen.
A lot of things about this film have made deep impressions on me, but the one that I'll mention here is the sight of the Bosnian National Library burning after being bombed, and Bill saying that '...with it burned basically all the history of Bosnia because Bosnia is a country with a lot of history written by monks and and clerics and whatnot and it pretty much is gone and that's a problem today because now you have a country with no real written history which can lead problems because it allows people to make up their own history and that is a problem in Bosnia today.' (quoted from the DVD.)
4) There are all kinds of ways history rewrites itself. Sometimes it's because one person pulls together threads and odds and ends of impressions and sees the pattern formerly woven that has been hidden from view by misdirection, by forgetting, by not-wanting-to-know.
My uncle, my father's oldest brother, was a bomber pilot in World War 2. I met him once. Over the years, in scraps of information from my father, I learned my uncle been shot down and captured at some point, came home very ill, and died young of cirrhosis caused both by starvation while he was a prisoner of war and partly by his drinking after he got home.
What I've put together since is this: he bombed Heroya, Hamburg, Paris, in 1943. He was shot down in France. He was held in one of the concentration camps, I don't know which one. I've walked in places that are changed forever because, before I was born, my father's older brother was dropping bombs on them.
I don't know what to do with that, really, or what it means, except that just as these two classes this term are giving me opportunities to re-view and re-learn, more globally, the smattering of history I've had in the past, so too this more personal connection to place, people, and history gives me opportunity to appreciate, to not take so much for granted, everything I have in my life.
Including my right to consider my body my own: not pre-or-post-pregnant, not a tool of the state or church or a man, but mine. I remember before Roe vs. Wade, before Planned Parenthood; I remember the thalidomide scandal and the deep shame that a man in our Friends Meeting, a physician who had prescribed thalidomide to mothers, felt as the facts came out, as he confronted what it meant to have been an unknowing part of that, and as he worked out how he, as a doctor, had to change his relationship to 'who owns the woman's body'.
This was in the 1950's. It was shocking and progressive and unusual that he spoke so, but I didn't know that- I thought it was part of some larger national conversation about how to be healthier, more intelligent, more compassionate, less insane.
And so here endeth PETDM # 14- with my (rambling, incoherent) plea to look again at what is being done in your name. I understand about conscience, I do- I could not give lethal injection. I have argued with surgeons about keeping some patients alive and allowing others to die. I recognize that there is indeed something precious and sacred about new life, and I'm not in a position to absolutely, categorically state when that life begins.
But taking away from the woman carrying the baby the right to determine her own health- that bothers me. Not developing the national conversation about the obligation of men to prevent unwanted pregnancy, to support the health and safety of communities, of mothers, of daughters- that bothers me.
So please. Go. Read. Take a stand, and stand behind it. You never know when, with the swipe of a pen or the pressing of a button, your life and all the lives you know are changed, irrevocably, and all you have left is how you've lived up until this moment.
it would be so easy if there weren't so much i want to talk about, and if my brain would stay awake long enough to actually help me make coherent posts.
1) tammy212 has better posts than I about the Health and Human Services "conscience rule". Deadline for HHS to decide is 10 days away now; Planned Parenthood Petition is here.
2) I love it when one sentence in a book opens the world tenfold for me. From The Wild Swan (my find from San Francisco last week) these sentences- just a bit of background information setting up Andersen's first round of travels as an adult: The Germany of independent states through which Andersen passed on his first visit was to be transformed within his lifetime. The Holy Roman Empire with its three hundred and ninety-six principalities, ecclesiastical states and free towns had been completely reorganized by Napoleon in 1806. After his defeat it was found impossible to restore the old order[...]
Which both reinforces that even in the known and incomplete history of the North American continent (about which, between Native American studies and Chicano/Latino Cinema, I am being given new points of view) there are orders and orders which came and went before Europe came; some of which is recorded, still, in the oral histories of the people still surviving and some, did we have eyes to see, in the geography and ecology of the continent itself.
3) I bought Miss Sarajevo. For a lot of reasons- because I have a good friend who is becoming a director of documentaries. Because people I admire and respect are involved in bringing his bookFools Rush In to the screen.
A lot of things about this film have made deep impressions on me, but the one that I'll mention here is the sight of the Bosnian National Library burning after being bombed, and Bill saying that '...with it burned basically all the history of Bosnia because Bosnia is a country with a lot of history written by monks and and clerics and whatnot and it pretty much is gone and that's a problem today because now you have a country with no real written history which can lead problems because it allows people to make up their own history and that is a problem in Bosnia today.' (quoted from the DVD.)
4) There are all kinds of ways history rewrites itself. Sometimes it's because one person pulls together threads and odds and ends of impressions and sees the pattern formerly woven that has been hidden from view by misdirection, by forgetting, by not-wanting-to-know.
My uncle, my father's oldest brother, was a bomber pilot in World War 2. I met him once. Over the years, in scraps of information from my father, I learned my uncle been shot down and captured at some point, came home very ill, and died young of cirrhosis caused both by starvation while he was a prisoner of war and partly by his drinking after he got home.
What I've put together since is this: he bombed Heroya, Hamburg, Paris, in 1943. He was shot down in France. He was held in one of the concentration camps, I don't know which one. I've walked in places that are changed forever because, before I was born, my father's older brother was dropping bombs on them.
I don't know what to do with that, really, or what it means, except that just as these two classes this term are giving me opportunities to re-view and re-learn, more globally, the smattering of history I've had in the past, so too this more personal connection to place, people, and history gives me opportunity to appreciate, to not take so much for granted, everything I have in my life.
Including my right to consider my body my own: not pre-or-post-pregnant, not a tool of the state or church or a man, but mine. I remember before Roe vs. Wade, before Planned Parenthood; I remember the thalidomide scandal and the deep shame that a man in our Friends Meeting, a physician who had prescribed thalidomide to mothers, felt as the facts came out, as he confronted what it meant to have been an unknowing part of that, and as he worked out how he, as a doctor, had to change his relationship to 'who owns the woman's body'.
This was in the 1950's. It was shocking and progressive and unusual that he spoke so, but I didn't know that- I thought it was part of some larger national conversation about how to be healthier, more intelligent, more compassionate, less insane.
And so here endeth PETDM # 14- with my (rambling, incoherent) plea to look again at what is being done in your name. I understand about conscience, I do- I could not give lethal injection. I have argued with surgeons about keeping some patients alive and allowing others to die. I recognize that there is indeed something precious and sacred about new life, and I'm not in a position to absolutely, categorically state when that life begins.
But taking away from the woman carrying the baby the right to determine her own health- that bothers me. Not developing the national conversation about the obligation of men to prevent unwanted pregnancy, to support the health and safety of communities, of mothers, of daughters- that bothers me.
So please. Go. Read. Take a stand, and stand behind it. You never know when, with the swipe of a pen or the pressing of a button, your life and all the lives you know are changed, irrevocably, and all you have left is how you've lived up until this moment.