IF ONLY ....

  The news report today, including articles within The Reporter, are rife with terms and phrases that seemingly convey much. Mostly though they are replete with hot air, heated rhetoric, positions totally the opposite of what they seem to state or support.

 Remaining with us is the political aspect, wherein lies are pushed over and over again, becoming 'truths' in the minds of too many, over-whelmed by the attacks on sanity, reasoning, and civility. Too many now wrap themselves in cloaks of despair, concern, uncertainty, and are just plain good and tired of local, state, national, and world problems that have seemingly replicated themselves from the past. We continue to prove ourselves deaf, dumb, blind and stupid, as we forget the lessons of history, the need to heed it and learn from it.

Most of us can remember the drills of our childhood days when we were told to hide beneath our wood desks or line up in the hallway, against the walls. That would, of course, protect us from nuclear bomb fallout. Even as the harrowing pictures of vaporized people, their shadows on the walls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seared themselves into our minds. Even as we fought in two more wars, calling back the same soldiers or their younger brothers or even their sons. 

We fought wars we lost, took on more - that we also lost. Where we never had a realistic chance at 'winning' if there truly is a winner in any war. Where the wars were seemingly endless, swallowing up hundreds of thousands of men and women. For naught at the end of it all. The destruction of these wars followed the veterans home, suffering from unacknowledged PTSD, or from chemicals used during the war - by us. Placed within a poor medical program for veterans.  Yes, things are better now, but why are we still fighting, repeating the same errors, leaving behind locals who risked their lives and worked with us. Why? Why?

One excellent contributor to the Reporter spoke whimsically about returning to the past, turning back the clock. Sweet, as we paint the past with rosy hues, ignoring the problems that were overlooked, even as the Fifties, apparently an ideal time to grow up proved otherwise. The Wonder years were not necessarily so wonderful. That generation of privileged children grew into a most profoundly disturbed and disturbing generation, strong ideals, corrupted ideals, forgotten ideals, and lots of woes.  Idealistic and cynical, generation of rebels which morphed in time to a most conservative layer of society, even reneging on some of their fights. No, I do not wish to relive some hard years, not at all.

We speak of bodily integrity, with both sides of the tongue and mouth involved. Bodily integrity means that one has the power, the right, to control, to decide, what is to happen to that body. Hence, we are allowed to refuse treatment, or demand treatment. We can go to a doctor or ignore it, creating a worse problem, cost the taxpayers money, yet there is that principle of bodily integrity. But then it disappears, swallowed whole by society's ills.

Today there are too many rooting for closure of that right, at least in the area of choice by women. To remain pregnant or not. To have a child most manifestly doomed to a very brief, painful existence. To carry a fetus to term, conceived under violent or perfectly vile conditions. To carry a fetus to term when the mother herself would either die or be profoundly damaged. To carry a fetus to term when there is no money to care for it, and society most assuredly does not provide for it after birth. The hurts of impoverishment, underprivilege, of being unwanted, unloved ignored, society cold to all that. The uncertainties and pangs of adoption, not such an easy out. Ask an adoptee or the parents on both sides. No, bodily integrity is so necessary here, but where has it gone?

It has gone into a return to the past, to a past of dead and dying violated women, victims of society, killed, damaged beyond repair in back alley, illegal abortions. It is a world now wherein the poor find it almost impossible to find a clinic for a safe, necessary abortion. Even the pills that would help are being attacked by rabid anti-choice people, deluded into thinking they are doing right. They are not. The violence, even murder, perpetrated by the movement on doctors, volunteers, people seeking abortions is unacceptable. Kill life to 'save' life?!

The vaccines. Different. This is a public health issue. Typhoid Mary was found, not given a hug and kiss and told to "go and spread more disease". No, she was isolated, had to give up her kitchen career. For the public good. No one has to be isolated here unless it is necessary for their health and/or the health of others. Those who refuse vaccinations are indeed eager to get, be served by that same aid.

The vaccine is safe, assured, working. Masks certainly do not harm anyone, even perhaps saving them from disease or infecting others. How is that in any way equivalent to the issue of abortion, when a total body, a total person, future of individuals are at stake, not the health - or death - of multiples of millions!?

We must march forward, even if by inches, learn from, the past, not repeat its mistakes, under worse threats, wherein WWIII will be followed, inevitably, if humankind survives, to a WWIV, fought with sticks and stones and sharpened rocks attached to staves of wood.

We have got to do better.