Anti-abortion activists

On my way to work last Thursday I passed 3 anti-abortion activists standing on Hamilton St. on the sidewalk in front of Cedar Beach. They were standing behind large posters of the same aborted fetus. Two of the signs said, Abortion and the third had an arrow pointing to an office building across the street and had the word, "abortionist" written on it.

Just a few days before I happened upon a documentary on FSTV or LINK about bomblets in Laos and how young children, particularly boys are still being injured by the crap left behind from a war that ended nearly 30 years ago.

Where are the blown up color pictures of those dead and injured actually existing children? Where are the pictures of people starving and dying of diseases spread by war? Why aren't the "pro-lifers" out there demanding food, clothing, shelter, medicine and education for the undead-aka the living?

I had a vision of the Scarlet Letter burned on their chests underneath their neat, conventional clothing. I wondered what terrible sin each of them was hiding.

They were only there for one day thank goodness. It doesn't bother me to look at those pictures. It makes me angry that the pictures I saw on Al Jazeera of the child swathed in bandages or the one dead with a part of his skull missing aren't being carried on the street. It makes me angry that the pictures of the victims of cluster bombs in Yugoslavia and the diaries of the doctors trying to deal with the shredded limbs there was no way to save weren't read on the air every night.

Abortion is not about the fetus. Abortion is about a woman's right to control one teeny tiny part of her body. We are all assaulted daily by propaganda-men and women, but does a man have to walk into a mall and see a Victor's Secret shop where he can buy all manner of costumes that lift and seperate, reveal and conceal in all the right places? Do men wear wonder jocks to fill them out and plump them up? Would any of this make them more appealing to women? Think of it that way and you have to laugh.

I wish they would re-run the 1970's TV show, "All that Glitters" on Nick at Night. I don't remember all of it-It was on right before or right after "Mary Hartman." Chuck McCann, Anita Gillete, Linda Grey, David Duke, Marilyn Sokol and that guy from WKRP in Cincinatti-not Howard Hesseman, the young guy-Gary somone. It reversed the roles of men and women, but it kept the society the same. It really made you see how ridiculous conventional roles are. I remember Chuck Mc Cann crying and wearing an apron and David Duke being in love with Linda Grey who had a sex change operation and was really a man and Marilyn Sokol was a sheik(ess) with a harem. I wish we had something like that now. Satire, I mean. But as Tom Lehrer said, "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."

This is disorganized and rambling, but it's all related somehow.
And I cannot believe that women are calling each OTHER "Chicks."
Please don't tell me it's the same thing as gay people calling themselves queer because it certainly doesn't feel like it. I mean "Chick Nation" doesn't have the same ring to it. I suppose at the root of it is the fact that we don't learn our own history-the movements of the '60's are seen as an aberration, not a continuation- a little spurt here, a little spurt there, not a wave that swept over the world. Maybe the tide is out, but the water's still here.

I'll leave that for another day.