STOP KILLING BABIES
01.23.07
Subtitle: An Everyday Washington, DC Experience
Speaking of cake (see previous post), winter finally arrived here in the nation’s capital and with it came the annual hoards of right-to-lifers-I-mean-fruitcakes, having descended upon our sweet city in order to celebrate-I-mean-protest the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I happened to be on the subway on my way to a client meeting, having what can only be described as a pretty blue Monday, when what should I see but dozens and dozens of fresh (if incredibly blank) faced youth and their leaders… a couple of priests in fully bizarre regalia: Those black religious looking coats with the white nehru collars… what do you call those? AND… strung around their necks these horrific life-size fire-engine-red stop sign-shaped placquards, which read in big white lettering: STOP KILLING BABIES.
I wasn’t sure what to do. Feeling the heat rise up my neck and into my face, with a sick feeling sloshing around my stomach, a weird suffocating sort of claustrophobic and hard-to-breathe feeling, which I suspect is the way it naturally feels when one’s freedom(s) is/are threatened, I began to formulate many brilliant, if illegal, plans for counter-insurgency ranging from quiet argument (is this what you think Jesus REALLY wants you to be spending time doing?) to loud argument (F-YOU, YOU FREAKING IDIOTS) to vandalism (with magic marker, how about: YOU STOP MAKING BABIES?!) to outright violence (ugh, I am loathe to admit and will thus spare you the details, simply call it: Welcome to Jodi’s Abu Graib).
In the end, I just sat there, feeling sick and smothered and hot and itchy-scratchy in my wool coat. I tried to think about people in my life who I know feel the same way as the protestors, people who I love and to whom I want to express nothing short of complete tolerance, and upon whom I wish no harm (yet, can’t I still keep my freedom to choose? Please?).
So, I kept my big fat atheistic secular humanistic Jew mouth shut. Of course that didn’t make me feel so good either and only served to make my stomach REALLY hurt.
A lose-lose situation if ever there was.
