Living Here

This week I am going to be “switching things up” and I guess there will be a big “change of pace”. In part, this may be due to a dearth of propaganda influencing me and causing me to react (and / or retaliate). But the way I will introduce this topic will probably trigger a few people. Before I introduce it, I would like to give a big “shout out” to Monica Guzman’s “A Braver Way” podcast, a recent episode of which provided the fodder for me to chew on long and hard, and yet to nonetheless hardly come to any significantly new conclusions at all.

That said: I now intend proceed with my triggering exercise. I am vehemently “pro-life”.

Before you jump, let me try to explain a little more. My pro-life stance is probably very little like the stance which most people consider to be “pro-life”. Before I move on, I should probably also acknowledge the two women who mostly stuck their necks out to produce the episode of “Kelly Corrigan Wonders” featured in the podcast episode — Kelly Corrigan and April Lawson.

I think my own “pro-life” stance first of all, and yet also somewhat ironically, matches up with Kelly’s “pro-choice” stance — namely that I am first and foremost standing up for my own life (and also for others like me). I also feel this is indeed not a choice, but rather an instinctive behavior.

There was a point in the discussion in which Kelly and April considered a question along the lines of “what current issues will future generations look at and say ‘they must have overlooked this (obvious) fact‘. I will now go out on a limb and say that one such issue is that the “pro-life” side usually means exclusively pro- human life. The supposed “pro-life” stance seems to be completely ignorant of the obvious fact that logically it is impossible to take a “pro-life” stance and at the same time carry out an “anti-habitat” existence.

A few years ago I engaged in a prolonged argument that I to this day cannot maintain has been resolved in a sort of “settled” way. Generally, it has to do with the degree of medical support given to people who are not only so sick that they are otherwise not able to keep living independently, but who are also diagnosed with this as a hereditary condition — plus: who were diagnosed with this hereditary condition before they were able to produce offspring. In these cases, I believe society ought to be able to offer these people a deal. The basic idea is that if these people voluntarily allow themselves to undergo sterilization, then they will not only receive the full medical treatment they would receive in any case, but they would also receive a full life pension and be allowed to adopt children (freely, healthy or otherwise) and also to help people living with this condition (if they want to). Basically, this means their own lives and livelihoods would be “guaranteed” in exchange for freely deciding to refrain from spreading the hereditary disease.

I feel as though I am fully aware of the problematic issues involved in such a deal. I also feel that such problematic issues are unavoidable. Most of all, I feel that whereas today issues related to discrimination are not addressed adequately, such discriminatory issues might potentially be significantly reduced under such a scheme.

This is a particular issue I feel very adamantly about. My hunch is that my own personal opinion is probably not a very popular opinion, and yet I maintain that I have a right to express my own opinion.

Likewise, my hunch is that arguments that there exists a sort of “natural right” to life are (on the other hand) quite popular. Yet seldom do people ask the very important follow-up question: which life does the mainstream view propagate? If a person (or other life form) is thereby condemned to an existence of exclusion from a life filled with social activities, from the ability to pursue experiencing happiness or similar conditions, then such condemnation appears much less appealing (at least to me).

At any rate, I feel that a world in which a miniscule minority are allowed to get filthy rich via methods that are clearly destroying the habitats of the vast majority of living beings, such that mass extinction on a global scale becomes the order of the day, then these are crimes against life, nature and prosperity. In conclusion, I would argue that it is much more important to consider whether future generations will exist at all than what such potential future generations might think.