How is a bullet better than poison gas?

Imagine how you would react if China launched their version of cruise missiles at Israeli military targets because the Chinese Government did not approve of the way the Israelis had conducted a military operation in the West Bank.  You would probably be outraged, right?

Now tell me why the United States has any standing to launch a punitive attack against Syrian forces in the wake of their likely use of chemical weapons on Syrian rebel-held territory.  How has it come about that we have appointed ourselves in charge of punishing nations who do things the global community of nations disapproves of?

If the world is outraged by the use of chemical weapons in Syria, the world should do something about it—not just the United States.

And while I am ranting, how are chemical weapons different from more traditional ways of brutally killing your own citizens?  The Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad has killed between 20,000 and 40,000 rebel fighters.  The rebels have killed near 30,000 Syrian soldiers and police.  By all accounts, more than 100,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting. 

How are the deaths of those 100,000 children, men, and women any more acceptable than the deaths of the 1000 killed by a chemical agent last week?  This distinction between conventional weapons and chemical weapons is stupid.  Weapons are weapons and dying is dying. 

President Obama and those who support a limited strike on Syrian military capacity say they are sending a message that the use of chemical weapons crosses the line.  I would agree that a limited strike does send a message.  But I would also argue that supporters leave the second half of the message it sends unstated.

“The use of chemical weapons crosses a line—that the use of old-fashioned bullets, landmines, mortars, and shells does not cross, so you should feel free to rain those more traditional weapons down on civilians all you want.”  Is this really the message President Obama—and the rest of the world—wants to send?

I have no solution here.  In an ideal world, the UN would be unanimous in its condemnation of the Syrian regime and all of their actions against civilians.  It would also deplore any rebel actions aimed at civilians.  The UN has proven time and again to be a terribly flawed and mostly powerless institution when it comes to preventing violence.  

But this is far from an ideal world and bad actors have forever, (and probably will always), use whatever means at their disposal when they are feeling like they are out of options.  For the United States to have any credibility, we need to either stand up for innocents EVERY time governments use any weapons against them or we need to be much more cold-hearted and practical and respond only when our self-interest as a nation is at stake in a real and strategic way.  Our selective moral outrage drives me crazy and only serves to lessen our credibility around the world.

A weapon is a weapon, whether it be a suicide bomb strapped to the belly of a 12-year old girl, a drone-launched missile fired at a Land Rover in the desert around Marib in Yemen, a smallpox-infected blanket left as a gift for relocated Native Americans, or Sarin gas deployed against a town in Syria.  The people who die, die.  One way is not any more morally reprehensible than another to me.

I hope in the coming days President Obama will see the futility of any sort of military strike against the Syrian regime.  But I doubt it.

Pick-Me-Up

            There are two villages called “Birney” in Southeastern Montana.  One is on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation and it is called “Indian Birney” by everyone.  The other is ten miles south of Indian Birney and it is off the reservation.  It is known by all as “White Birney.”

            I spent several summers in Indian Birney, sleeping either on the floor of an old doublewide trailer or in the desanctified nave of an old Catholic Church.  During my second summer in Birney, the group of teens I was with helped build a traditional powwow arbor on an unused patch of land just off the main drag.  As we built it, I knew that my kids were getting an experience few of their peers back East would be able to understand.

            They got to go up into the pine forests on the rocky hillsides of the reservation and help choose which trees to fell for use as support posts for the double ring of the arbor.  Then they helped strip the branches, dig the post holes, plant the posts, tamp the dirt, tack chicken wire overhead, and lay the pine boughs across the top for shade.  It was backbreaking labor and my sixteen wealthy teenagers from the East Coast could not get enough of it. One of my favorite pictures from that summer is of a sixteen year-old girl from the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  She is holding a worn and dirty work glove in her teeth, examining the bloody blisters on her hand, and smiling from ear to ear.

            It rained a lot that summer, forcing us to delay and cancel many workdays.  As the final day of our program approached, we began to seriously think the arbor would not be finished in time for us to participate in the first powwow held in Birney in many years.  Our penultimate day on the reservation was a fifteen-hour work marathon that left us all simultaneously exhausted and exhilarated.  As the last of the long lingering twilight drained from the sky to the west, we got it done.  The arbor was complete.

            Some of the tribal members who were working with us had spread the word that there would be a powwow in Indian Birney the next day.

            Saturday morning dawned grey, cold, and wet and a feeling of depressed anti-climax settled over us all as we began to pack and get ready for the following day’s drive to the airport in Sheridan, Wyoming and the ensuing flights to points East.  We all kept one eye to the sky, but the sky just kept raining on our arbor.

            My friend Mike, who lived in Birney, just kept telling me and the kids not to worry.  He said the sky would clear, the sun would shine, and the powwow would happen.  As morning turned past twelve and into afternoon, the rain kept falling steady as a drum on the church roof.  The atmosphere grew more and more disappointed inside as kids played Hearts, took pictures, and copied down each other’s phone numbers for when they got home.

           

            At three o’clock the rain stopped falling.  By three-fifteen the clouds were breaking up.  And by four we were practically dancing as we set up tables, brewed coffee, and changed into our fancy clothes for the powwow.  By five o’clock more than one hundred cars had arrived and there were hundreds of Cheyenne tribal members there to christen the new Birney Powwow Arbor.  Elders showed up and thanked my kids in the Cheyenne language, people brought out tons of food from their trunks likes clowns from a circus car.  When the buffet tables were all set, we had enough food to feed everyone twice.

            My kids participated in giveaways, grass dances, and circle dances set to traditional drumming circles pounding out the heartbeat of a culture determined to survive.  Everything stopped at one point and my kids were asked to line up in the center of the arbor.  Each of them was then presented with a beautiful hand-beaded gift from the tribe as a way to say “thank you” for all their hard work.

           

            Here it is fifteen years later and whenever I allow myself to really remember the details of that afternoon and evening and late into the night, I cry.  It was one of the most authentically touching moments of my life and whenever I need to feel good about the future and about humans’ ability to bridge cultural divides, I dive into my memories of that summer and that particularly magical night.

The House Where Immigration Reform Goes to Die

Did you see the big news out of Washington, D.C. this week?  I am not referring to the Supreme Court’s rulings on Affirmative Action, DOMA, or California’s Prop 8.  I am talking about the fact that 68 Senators agreed on a major piece of legislation.  Yes, 68 (!!!) Senators in this remarkably polarized era agreed on both the need to pass an immigration reform bill AND on the actual bill itself.  This is momentous.

Every Democrat and 14 Senate Republicans voted for the bill.  There were 32 Republican Senators who voted against the bill.  When I read the news, I was surprised and heartened—for about 30 seconds.

And then I turned my attention to the Place Where Bipartisan Bills Go To Die—the United States House of Representatives.  Speaker John Boehner has already said that he is not going to bring the Senate bill to a vote in the House.  Rather, he is going to bring to a vote a House version of the bill.  Boehner said, "For any legislation, including a conference report, to pass the House, it's going to have to be a bill that has the support of a majority of our members."

In English what he said is, “My crazy-ass Tea Party Caucus is, once again, going to kill this commonsense legislation because they do not know how to govern.  They only know how to say “no” to any idea that exhibits even a whiff of rational compromise.”

Boehner’s more conservative members have certainly gone to Washington and done just what they have said they would do—stand uncompromisingly against anything they feel is not conservative enough.  The thing is, the country is not an extremely conservative country.  America has always been a middle-of-the-road place.  Our politics play themselves out in the spaces just slightly left and right of center.   Ronald Reagan was not a right wing ideologue.  Barack Obama is about as Marxist as Richard Nixon was.  We value predictability in our national policies and we have had a remarkably stable national political history because of this.

The Republican Party is legislating itself into a corner where they will be left with older white voters as their only constituency.  Personally, this is fine with me.  They will be relegated to the status of a regional party with little chance of winning the Presidency.  It is fascinating to watch a Party struggle to find its own future.  The Tea Party radicals are pushing hard to the right, but the nation is not following.  Congress currently has a 10 percent approval rating.  I would argue that the main reason behind this abysmally low rating is the perception that the inmates have taken over the asylum in the Republican House.

Most Americans want immigration reform to happen.  When The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal agree on something, it must have some merit, right?  Many experts agree that immigration reform would be a boon to America’s efforts to reduce the deficit.  

Immigration reform needs to happen and the US Senate has crafted a compromise bill that tightens the border AND allows for a path to citizenship to people who have come to this country illegally but who have since worked hard, paid taxes, and made this a better country.  For any immigration bill to pass it will need to have pieces that please each side in the debate.  But it will also need to have pieces that displease each side.  Speaker John Boehner has proven unable to make his Tea Partiers see this truth.  They are willing—and PROUD of the fact that they are willing—to tear it all down in the name of ideological purity. 

So, my happiness over the Senate’s passage of the Immigration Reform bill passed quickly and was replaced by resignation that together, Congress cannot pass any meaningful bills until someone steps forward and gets the Tea Party Caucus in the House to act like grown ups instead of petulant children.

Some Thoughts Inspired by Texas State Senator Wendy Davis

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis’s filibuster in Austin Tuesday night managed to temporarily derail a restrictive Texas abortion bill that would have had the effect of closing 37 of the state’s 42 clinics currently providing abortions to women in Texas.  I say “temporarily” because it is pretty likely that governor Rick Perry will call for another special session of the Texas Legislature in the near future and this bill will pass easily.  Those opposed to abortion view passage of this bill as a great victory in the battle against legalized abortion.  Those who support a woman’s right to choose to end her pregnancy see this law as further erosion of the right secured in the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

            The abortion debate has been raging for as long as I have been politically aware.  The pendulum seems to be swinging toward more restrictions on abortion.  Lately, anti-abortion forces have taken the battle to the legislatures of more conservative states and have managed to pass bills that:

• ·      require pregnant women seeking an abortion to view an ultrasound image of their fetus,
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• ·      ban telemedicine “visits” as the basis for prescribing an abortion,
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• ·      shorten the gestational time period during which abortions can be provided,
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• ·      and exempt employers from requirements to provide contraceptive coverage in their health care plans.

In the end, though, using state laws to limit (or even to ban) abortions is a losing strategy.  Cleary people have very strong feelings about abortion.  I have seen this in my own life when we lived in New Haven right around the corner from a Planned Parenthood clinic that provides abortions.  There were dedicated protesters on the corner every Saturday and Sunday morning.  Passersby would sometimes get into heated discussions with the protesters, though I doubt any minds were changed as a result of any of these interactions.

Passing new laws strikes me as the legislative equivalent of these heated street corner discussions.  Opinions get expressed, but nothing gets settled.  Whoever shouts louder (or collects more votes) temporarily holds sway.  And no good is accomplished.  Passing ever-more restrictive abortion laws does nothing about the root causes.  Women are not saying “I am going to get pregnant so that I can have an abortion.”  That’s like saying “I am going to develop a melanoma so that I can go through radiation and chemo.”  No.  Women are getting pregnant unintentionally and then having to decide what to do about it.

Some small percentage of these unintended pregnancies is the result of rape or incest.  Most are not.  According to data from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended.  About 4 in 10 of these are ended by abortion.  Roughly 22 percent of all U.S. pregnancies end in abortion.  Severely restricting access to safe abortions will not suddenly make these 22 percent of pregnant American women carry their babies to term.  Many of them will continue to choose to have an abortion.  Only it would be an illegal choice, performed in unregulated conditions by unlicensed and possibly untrained abortionists.  As we have seen with marijuana and alcohol, making something illegal does not stop it from happening.  Outlawing abortion would only make it move back to the dark, dirty nooks and crannies of our country.

I am pro-choice, yet I often feel some reluctance to fully discuss abortion with my pro-choice friends.  I feel this hesitancy because when we really get into the details many of them will never use the word “baby.”   They say “fertilized egg,” “embryo,” and “fetus.”  It matters a LOT to them that we cannot say when “life” begins.  I have a different view.  To me, when a human egg and a human sperm unite their genetic payloads and then start dividing like crazy, the result is a human life.  It can be nothing BUT a human life.  (I will not address the issue of a soul because I do not believe such a thing exists—I am talking strictly biologically here.  And neither should our laws be based on any talk of when the soul enters the body—this is an argument for theologians, not politicians.)

Having said that the dividing cells in a woman are really an unwanted baby, it then makes me sound like a monster to support that woman’s right to kill that baby.  Yet, I do.  Women who are old enough to conceive a child have the right to decide whether to carry that child to term or not.  The Supreme Court has famously ruled that states must allow abortions before “fetal viability” at approximately 24 weeks.  This seems like a reasonable compromise that allows women to control their own reproduction while at the same time recognizing a baby’s right to be born once it becomes more and more viable outside the womb.  I am not pro-abortion.  I am pro-choice.  Other than a few corporations who profit from abortion, I do not think anyone is pro-abortion.

Which brings me to my real point here.  Rather than fighting it out over how permissive or restrictive state abortion laws should be, advocates on both sides of the fight should be working where they share common ground.  Good-hearted, well-meaning people from both sides should put down their placards, turn down their volumes, and get to work on reducing the incidence of unwanted pregnancies.  Women and girls should get good information about how pregnancies happen.  They should also have access to affordable, safe, and effective birth control.  If we can reduce the rate of unwanted pregnancy, we can reduce the number of abortions carried out each year.

In my (sometimes heated) conversations with some of the protesters outside of the Planned Parenthood on Whitney Avenue in New Haven, it was clear to me that they were certainly willing to sacrifice the good for the perfect.  When I asked them about reducing unwanted pregnancies through greater access to safe and effective birth control, they were adamantly opposed.  They stated again and again that sex outside of marriage, with pleasure as the purpose rather than procreation, is wrong and against God’s plan.  To facilitate this sort of sex by providing a means of birth control is absolutely immoral to these protesters.  They are remaining true to their religious beliefs, but in their own way perpetuating the high incidence of abortion in this country.  Rather than acknowledge the reality that people will have sex, they want to impose a world where everyone who has sex and gets pregnant MUST have her child.  Theirs is an unforgiving black and white world.

The world we live in is far messier than the one these anti-choice protesters wish we lived in.  This world is one of laws, not religious teachings and beliefs.  The way to advance the good (a reduction in the number of abortions) is for those strongly opposed to abortion to let go of their demand that we replace it with the perfect (a total ban on all abortions.)  I certainly respect the right of those opposed to abortion to protest.  It is their right, (I would argue their duty), to vociferously make their opinions known.  But I would respect them much more if they took the practical step of working to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies. 

So, Senator Wendy Davis has won a small temporary victory in Texas.  When the legislature there reconvenes and passes the law that was thwarted last night, the anti-abortion forces will feel like they have won a major victory.  They will be wrong.  They will really just have forced women to have unwanted babies, to travel hundreds of miles for a safe abortion in one of Texas’s five remaining clinics, to go to Mexico for an abortion, or to have an unsafe, illegal abortion closer to home.  Changing the law will not reduce the number of unintended, unwanted pregnancies.  Other things will.  If the “pro-lifers” are really pro-life, they should work to reduce these pregnancies, not to reduce the options available to women.