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Our CRD has ED: Domestically and Abroad
The common mindset of US officials who presume American empire is acceptable and citizens who presume that abortion of other living beings is their right, is imperial exceptionalism. In both cases the death of others for our continued comfort, whatever the kind of comfort, is justified as "our due."
If the CRD's (constitutional democratic republic) citizens feel this way about their "right" to destroy the defenseless and dependent to insure their access to society's highest rewards, how much more may its officials justify imperial domination of relatively defenseless and weak nation states to insure access to energy's greatest rewards?
This is a domestic and foreign problem I'll call ED for lack of a better term. It's Empire Dysfunction, in which an imperial mindset of exceptionalism and unquestionability has set in and hardened the arteries and ear drums of the ethical mind.
ED is exactly that which causes the CRD to become flaccid and the once independent, responsible and spirited people that worked for a CRD to become one wobbling mass of fearful, manipulable rubber-stampers of all powers that do wrong yet leave them free to consume. This is ED at its worst. And it is systemic, so Mr. Obama may just as easily find his political genetics virally coopted by it as Mr. McCain, Ms. Clinton or anyone else who depended on its Proponents to get into office.
And among the Proponents, those whose bottom line is not human life, but dollars, can fairly be assumed to have a motive to leave ED in place. For those whose greatest interests are backed into a perceived corner and who can't humble themselves, the justified killing of others isn't far behind. It's their "due." And using other people's money (taxpayers) and other peoples' lives (children) to kill and be killed is the SOP of these business interests.
Why is it their "due"? Well, haven't their appointed justices over the past several decades left abortion intact? The tacitly agreed recipe: falsely justified right to kill in exchange for the falsely justified right to kill, add lots of useless words of indignation as propaganda, and pretend to lose as a pretext for getting elected tomorrow so that one can "win" and finally "end those imperial wars," or "make abortion obsolete."
Hopefully Mr. Obama, promising to reach common ground and common sense solutions to formerly intractible problems among us, and with other nation states, will work with his team to make both forms imperial domination of the weak and defenseless an obsolete and unnecessary evil.
Isn't it long past time that our wars be only those necessary to defend our lives from foreign and domestic aggression, and abortions to save the lives of moms?
Comments (2)
I kinda think your basic premise is a tad absurd:
Those are not equals, and the fact that a fetus, if it is left to mature can one day become one of those hoping and dreaming people is not the point.
June 22, 2008 3:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
C'mon Cville.
The distinctions you make are illusory.
One of your premises about abortion, that "a fetus" that you call "an organism" is all that is at stake, is already stated in the form of a half-truth. You leave out "human fetus" and "human organism," and that is an admission that you believe that such modifiers would discredit your assertions.
Also, in discussing war, you state a positive to imply a negative, that because persons killed or hurt in war are living and breathing, that fetuses must not be. We both know that is false, and that the living and breathing differs only in terms of location, method, stage of development and dependence. Those difference also differentiate born infants from adults.
Your distinctions seem to come down to dreaming and thinking. Yet another's dreams and thought, indeed most peoples', do not give value to anyone else. It seems that subjectively, you imply that these are the things that make people worthy of love. Can you love someone who has no thoughts? Can you love a Zen master, for example, who has achieved no-mind? If she harbors no dreams or thoughts, but seeks to reside in a void, shall we deem that person dispensable like you do an unborn human life in being?
Also, philosophically, I'm not sure we know whether an unborn human being is incapable of what we identify here as life-value faculties. It may well be that they begin more advanced in a connection between wisdom and active daily living, because they focus on the important things, don't they? Love, interdependence, sleep, meals, touch, real emotions, and human relationships. As a person gets more "sophisticated" as some warp the word, he or she may get more attached to things and their accumulation ... becoming even fearsome toward others and breaking down trust in human relations...to the point that they provoke others to do the same ... and it is such a world that in its conduct expresses its hatred for childhood and its centrism on things money can buy.
Abortion is the expression of such a spirit, a spirit that seeks a knife to cut off those which threaten the accumulation, those for whom we should rather put down our weapons but instead allow some of our people to raise knives against them. It is an atrocity in every way, to everyone.
Abortion is analogous to the imperial fiat assumed by Dick Cheney to put human lives into harm's way to benefit industries (material things and artificial persons) to which he has ties, and to which he has attached his personal interests and sense of security. The difference? Abortion is just carried out by "leaders" on a different scale.
Like a politician during a campaign who promises great things for humanity who gets elected and then rescinds the promises and adopts the ongoing evil of those attached to things over people, the person who willingly conceives a child with another and then aborts, acts out a physical, implied promise regarding the power exercised, and then rescinds the meaning of it all and destroys its natural meaning in the form of another human life.
June 23, 2008 5:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
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