A Cause Without Controversy

Last week I lamented that the noble causes of the world tend to be bogged down in complications and controversy, and that I was unwilling to get involved. I now must confess that I jumped the gun on that. While there are many, many complex issues that I don’t want to touch, there are a few causes out there for which I do feel comfortable with typing my full unabashed support, with no qualms about who might be offended.

The first issue I thought of was sex trafficking. My sister’s father-in-law’s daughter (would that make her my sister-in-law?) actively combats sex trafficking, but she does that in the Philippines.  I’m pretty sure that it isn’t a problem here and that none of the twelve people who read this blog are involved, so my harangue would be irrelevant but just in case: If you are involved in the sex trafficking business then SHAME ON YOU. Death by ruptured spleen is too good for you. In lieu of said trafficking, I have to fall to my next worthy and non-controversial cause: organ donation.

Contributing to medical causes can be a pain. Not as much pain as that poor kid suffering from MS mind you, but still a pain. Let them guilt you into sacrificing your five dollar footlong (and your address, you fool) for one day and you are plagued with a growling stomach for an afternoon and donation request junk mail for a lifetime and for what? Is five bucks seriously going to make a dent on the breast cancer front? Is five hundred? Five thousand? Cancer research can spend five thousand dollars in less time than it takes to eat that footlong. On the other hand, the returns with organ donation are amazing; you can save as many as eight lives and improve up to 50 for the sweet, sweet cost of zero dollars. On your part. The hospital staff has to get paid to harvest your guts, transport, and install them in someone else, but other people foot that bill so your family doesn’t have to worry about a thing. As for you, you’re dead, you have bigger concerns or none at all, depending.

The question isn’t so much of why you would want to be an organ donor as why would you not? In the sorrowful, regrettable event of your untimely demise, you will not be using those parts. If you do not donate they will literally rot. Are you afraid that the E.R. docs won’t work as hard to save your life if they know you are a donor? The E.R. is not responsible for anything donor related (thank your lucky stars for that). All they do is notify the people that are responsible once they have some viable parts. How about pain concerns? Do you think there’s a chance that you will still be alive when they start plucking your innards from your warm, bleeding corpse? I love Edgar Allen Poe too, but be realistic here; this is the 21^st century. We pretty much know whether someone is mostly dead or all dead.

Are you afraid that you won’t be able to have an open casket? First off, what kind of narcissist thinks that everyone wants one last look at his hauntingly cadaverous face? Second off, donation doesn’t alter the funeral plans. They dress you up like some macabre Barbie, replace the bones with metal rods and don’t take any skin off your face. Your eyes are sewn shut so no one can tell that your corneas are gone, so as far as dear aunt Milly is concerned you look perfectly normal, for a dead person anyway.

Are you under 18 and think this disqualifies you? Get your parents to sign off on it, it’ll make them proud to know that even if you cause a horrible traffic accident and die, you can give the guy you T-boned some of your viscera. Are you old, and think that no one will possibly want your crusty innards? Why don’t you be a donor anyway and let the folks with decades of medical training and practice make that call?

Some people claim that organs only go to the rich and/or famous. Allow me to congratulate those individuals for successfully dwelling in a magical, paranoid fantasy land parallel to the real one. I can think of about four different watchdog organizations off the top of my head that would be all over UNOS like plaid on a bad tie if that were the case but even if it were how cool would it be for Bruce Willis to have your kidney? That is quite literally the closest a person could ever be to a celebrity. He shook your hand once? Brilliant. Part of me lives inside him. Boom. You just became the coolest person at the afterlife party. At least the one your were invited to, anyway.

The last and final reason I can think of is the religion complaint, which I can understand, but I vehemently disagree. Christianity and Islam both believe in the resurrection of the dead, and wouldn’t it be confusing if you got raised but your guts were in someone else’s body? What zany hijinks! However, if you think that God has the power to raise the people who have been buried and rotted down into icky, icky goo before drying up into dust, but not the peeps who drowned in the ocean and whose bodies were nibbled away by fish, or the people who have been burned and their ashes blown away in the wind, or the people who thoughtfully checked “organ donor” on their driver’s licenses, you believe in a weak God. Seriously, you can do better. Besides that, most major religions check off on it. If it is that much of a concern to you go ahead and ask your priest/imam/Xenu, and they’ll give you the scoop.

Don’t be a selfish stiff. Be an organ donor.

Don't You Know There's a War On?!?

…And we have so many wars to choose from: the war on terror, the war on cancer, the war against marriage, against women, against poverty. We have race wars and culture wars and class wars, on drugs, on kids, and on insulin, of all things. If you want to fight for something bigger than yourself there are no lack for noble causes.

I worked in a real war once, or maybe it was just a conflict or police action? Congress kept changing its mind about that. Whatever it was I won’t say fought in it because I never pulled a trigger, but I did get up every morning (except the ones where I had worked through the night), pick up my wrenches and fix broken vehicles. I felt good about it, too. I never had to question my value to my country or my world, I was contributing to the nebulous Good and I felt good about it. I was helping to protect the white hats while they went out to capture the black hats, and even though the war could have been fought just as well without me, it would have been completely stagnant without people like me and that justified my existence for the day.

Now it’s different. I dropped my wrenches and picked up a word processor, and this question nags me; what have I done to contribute the nebulous Good today? I have become the American dream that I once swore to protect which is kind of noble I suppose, but I feel like I should be doing more. I should join another war, but which one?

Wars, it turns out, are more complicated than they seem. Take the right to life vs. the right to choose, for example. A pregnant girl should be able to unpregnify herself, right? Unless that squiggly thing inside her counts as human person, of course, then that would be state sanctioned murder. On the other hand, it seems that crime has taken a dramatic dip since Roe v. Wade. As it turns out, the kind of girl that has impulsive unprotected sex resulting in an unplanned child is not the kind that makes a great mother, so giving her the option to preemptively “take care” of her little bundle of joy means that those children never grow up to do crime. Back to the original hand, are we willing to go ahead and kill people before they are born for the crimes that they may or may not commit in the future? So we are back on the pro life side again, but then you see that if an impoverished woman has a baby, she not only has to pay out the nose for food, clothing and care for the bugger, she also isn’t able to work or finish school or whatever. Her opportunities are limited, and she stays poor. And then there is the bit that African Americans terminate their pregnancies more per capita than whites, and you have racial complications added to class complications.

This confusion is not unique to the right to life debate. The same can be said for the war on marriage, or the war on drugs, or the war on women, of which the war on babies is apparently a part. They are all miserable balls of guilt and vitriol, and I’m not interested in jumping in the middle of it.

Maybe I should ply my pen in a more neutral cause. Danielle Steele won’t be winning any humanitarian awards, but at least she is a stalwart heroine in the War on Boredom and that counts for something.

What is Real?

In Plato’s Cave, slaves are chained to a wall. They see shadows cast on the opposite wall, and debate among themselves concerning their meaning, purpose, and nature. These slaves are meant to represent us now on earth, with our limited understanding, trying to grasp high concepts such as the nature of love, justice, honor, truth, pain, and hope, among others.

We experience these things in our lives, but we do not understand them. We don’t know what it is that makes people love us, or why we love others, so we fantasize about it in bodice rippers and chick flicks, Twilight and Sex in the City and Romeo and Juliet. We instinctively know about justice. We know when it has been violated, particularly when we are on the losing end of it, but can we define it? Plato himself tries, albeit imperfectly. Why does pain exist? What purpose does it serve? We rebel from the idea that we should accept it, avoiding it at great cost. We rail against God and the fates when we experience it.

We are slaves, chained in place, seeing the shadows of these things thrown against the wall, enduring the assault of these things on our psyche and struggling to know what they are and what they mean. We understand only in part. If we could slip the chains and turn around to see the things that cast these shadows, perhaps when we are recaptured and returned to our place we will be better comforted, having known the true form of what these things are.

I am currently working on a book called First Monday Park. The bulk of this story takes place in a world where these things are more knowable. Postmodernism, the worldview that embraces the shadows and says, “These flickering forms are whatever you want them to be,” does not exist. It is a place where people know what justice is, know what pain is for, and know how to hope without foolishness.

My problem is that I am a slave that is still chained. I certainly have no hope of escaping myself, for I do not believe in transcendentalism on earth. The best I can do is inquire of other slaves who are also chained to the wall. I have to try to understand justice as Plato understood it before I can render it properly in the book. I have to know pain as Lewis believed it to be before I can show it in the real world. I have to seek out the sophists and philosophers, the askers and the thinkers, and consider what they say. I must discover if there is a consensus on these issues, and if there is good reason behind them. I must not bend to majority, but to truth, and place that in my book.

            In the interests of answering these questions, I am putting together a reading list of books that deal with the high minded, difficult questions. I want to cut underneath appearances and understand what things truly are. I am willing to stretch the limits on this. I will read philosophical essays and thought exercises, theology books, novels and quotes, anything that might help clarify what things are, how they present and why me might be confused when we see them, and how these things work together and support one another into a comprehensive picture. If you know of any, please send me authors and titles.
Some of the ones I already have on the list are 

“The Republic” by Plato, “The Problem of Pain” by C.S. Lewis, “Wild at Heart” and “Captivating” by John and Stasi Edlridge, “I, Robot” by Isaac Asimov and “The Upanishads.” 

Thanks for the feedback.