Informant38

I had a dream night before last where a guy who seemed like he was probably a cop was shooting at me. He was stocky and sort of swarthy and wearing a dark-red plaid shirt.
First he shot me in the left side then he shot me in the right side of my face. It was scary but not very realistic because I just kept standing there after he shot me, with part of my face blown away and blood gushing out all over. Then I realized I already knew what it felt like to be shot like that, that I'd known it for a long time, and I started letting him know that I knew that already, how it felt to take bullets, not so much speaking because my face was half shot away, but vibing it up.
Later in the same dream or dream-sequence there was a coat-hanger sort of bent into what I've used more than a couple times in my life as an antenna for a tv or car radio, it was on the floor here in the living room where the computer is. It was silver, like it had been chromed. It didn't have any narrative presence in the dream, it was just there on the floor.
Last night when I rode my bike to the store there was a white coat-hanger sitting in the middle of the bike lane, and it made me remember that part of the dream, and then the part where the cop was shooting at me.
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January 22 is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
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Part of the scam of our time is the creation of an ahistorical present.
In America people just kind of start from when they're born, only it's more like when they first begin to understand the television and then go to school. Then they get bits and pieces of official stories of how it was. But they get it from outside the family context. And it doesn't have much of the personal in it, almost none of the family. Connections to the famous are passed down, a relative like Ben Franklin or Caruso or Benny Goodman gets talked about, but for the majority of us what it was like for your great-great-grandparents is something you can only put together from photographs and the bits and pieces you get from outside the family, from school and television and in some cases, books.
A few of us got some fragments of personal history from our parents - the labor riots in Chicago, the McCarthy hearings, the Burma Road in WWII, the Oklahoma Land Rush, the 97th Engineers and the AlCan highway - though that's fading now as we go more than three generations deep into prosthetic child-rearing. The difference in importance between family histories and the approved versions that make it into the textbooks and televised documentaries is almost vertical, with family on the bottom.
So, because of that ahistorical disconnection, there's a sense in a lot of basically decent people's minds and hearts that abortion came into its own with the Supreme Court's ruling on Roe v. Wade. That before that abortion was not significant or common. That's helped a lot by the official public record reflecting the rigid taboo against speaking about anything to do with sex. However common abortion was, until the 1970's in America at least, no one talked about it publicly at all.
It was the same with homosexuality; and even more prohibited was the topic of child sexual molestation.
It would help if those who so adamantly disapprove of feminists and homosexuals could realize that it's because of the arduous struggle to make these issues public, the risks taken and oppressive resistance endured, that the even more taboo and even less represented subject of child molestation became something the public could admit the existence of, and begin to confront.
The official history doesn't acknowledge that abortion existed, though many women had them and by the 1960's everyone knew someone growing up who had had one - but that knowing only extended to the immediate moment, the present; and the channels through which knowledge should have come, the midwives and aunts and grandmothers-to-granddaughters lines of transmission, have been severed or stepped-down to such a minimal degree they can't hold enough of how things were to matter.
Whereas, if we had that unbroken chain of first-hand narrative stretching back through the centuries, there'd be the testimony that abortion, or intentional miscarriage - the induced termination of pregnancy - has been something women have sought and done, have been doing all along, not always for base selfish reasons, and not always from honest and serious motive either. But for tens of millennia, not three decades.
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Few of the violently anti-abortion folks seem upset to any great degree by the treatment of the elderly now, which has worsened steadily in America for a century. Not stayed the same, gotten worse in direct relation to the rise of selfishness as moral compass.
This is what's vulnerable about the abortion rights campaigners - that there's a tendency to use it as an almost cosmetic procedure.
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I think abortion is a very serious thing, but I also think genetic modification of animals is a grotesque and inhuman thing.
I don't have any doubt at all that human life is present in the womb from day one, but then I don't have much doubt that for all intents and purposes the sperm and ovum in their own ways are alive before they meet.
I don't think life begins at conception so much as it begins to change radically. It's already there. And it's the reverence for life that's missing, or so lopsided and exaggerated, in this polarizing conflict.
Reverence for life would obviously accumulate in the old. But in this severed reality, where the single thing most valued - money - is completely abstract and without real substance, reverence is archaic and disused.
The elderly know nothing about the things the young value, and they have nothing, and they aren't going to get anything but older and more in the way.
For almost the entire time we've been on this earth as human - banded together and working toward common goals - there's been the presence of experienced living examples of things that worked, the most basic proof there is that what they were doing was at least minimally successful.
You get old because the way you lived works.
Now the prestige of age is confined to hidden estates and the virtually invisible rooms of power. It's not that the aged don't get respect and deference, it's that they don't all get it; outside the circles of the elect the old are useless. Inside, where fortunes can be clung to as long as lawyers and medical science can be bought, there's a lot of respect for the still-potent elderly. Potent in the sense of still able to sting and bite and deploy the weapons and tools of wealth. Those guys get all kinds of respect - they're the apotheosis of consumer desire.
It would be encouraging to see some rage against that inequality from the defenders of the innocent.
And here's an idea - in a culture where masculinity has been reconfigured toward a kind of mercantile attainment the aged are feminized, and the female is less-valued, inferior.
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Too much of the question of abortion has been polarized, so that two large and powerful organized groups of people - both motivated by conscience and moral principle - are spending most of their energies in combat with each other.
Imagine what they could get done if they weren't.