It's The Little Things

This is a photo of an aborted child. Why am I showing you a photo of an aborted child? Because we never see one, do we? We're forced to talk about them all-the-time, but we never see what we're talking about. Is this that "clump of cells" I hear so much about - or a dead baby? 

Looks like a dead kid to me.

So - along with my truck conking out - I'm in about as much pain as a man can be. But I don't feel any of it, because of pain killers. They're not only masking my physical pain (and putting me somewhere between "Whee!" and wanting to vomit) but, emotionally, I'd be hard pressed to have ever been more ambivalent. Political activists, especially, will get nowhere with me right now - not that they ever have:

"Those who set themselves up to raise the public’s awareness are not just providing information; they’re also making a statement about themselves, about who they are. They, unlike those who require their support, are aware. Awareness is presented as a state of being all of us should aspire to attain. In its common usage today, the term awareness resists any clear definitions. It is not simply about knowing or understanding. So AIDS awareness, for example, is not reducible to knowledge of that disease; rather, it implies the adoption of the values of safe sex and the lifestyle associated with its values. People who are aware are likely to demonstrate this fact publicly, by wearing the right-coloured ribbon or bracelet or T-shirt and using the appropriate language. To be aware is to be on the morally superior side: not eating meat; not practising unprotected sex; not smoking; exercising regularly; riding a bicycle; recycling… these are just some of the rituals that signal that a person is aware."

Isn't there something ethically wrong with appointing yourself as morally superior? So aren't, say, Whole Foods and NPR actually citadels to evil? They certainly seem like it. That's why they both spend so much time and effort, smoothing over the edges, trying to make the ugly attractive:

"Recycling does sometimes makes sense -- for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there's no shortage of landfill space,...there's no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren't good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups -- politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations -- while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources."

I like the idea of the self-appointed morally superior NewAge hippies, working in cahoots with the politicians they claim to loathe, only to screw the rest of us.

To an artist, that symmetry is practically a pain killer all by itself,...