Sunday, March 27, 2005

An Easter Post

The Mormons have a television commercial running that depicts what I suppose is their perception of Jesus and those to whom he ministered. (Or, indeed, does it depict who it is the Mormons wish to bring into the fold, as it were, through the commercial?) In the commercial, Jesus is a white guy with red hair. Every one of Jesus' followers are white guys and gals. The sick, the hungry, the dying to whom Jesus speaks and comforts, touches and heals are, yeah, really, really white people.

There's no real reason to spend any amount of time pointing out that Jesus wasn't an Iowa farmer; he was a Semite as were his followers, as were the folks he comforted and healed who lived in what we today call the Middle East and, well, those folks weren't white people.

But, in this new age of neocon revisionistic the truth doesn't matter, bucko, it's the message, dummy, it's the message that counts, I guess we could expect no less from the Mormons.

I was thinking about the term pro-life and, of course, the logical obverse of that term anti-life.

I was thinking about my own mother's and father's deaths, both of which were preceded by a familial determination that extraordinary medical measures to prolong their lives for an hour, a day, a week were just simply obscenely gruesome given what we knew at the time; given that my family seems to be -- although religious to a degree -- inclined toward the simple truths of what our hearts and minds communicate to us in a kind of evolution of the species (we have evolved!) understanding of what is right and wrong; of what is intellectually compassionate and what is emotionally absurd. No, no need to go into the Schiavo case.

No, when my family made those decisions about my mother and father they were not decisions that were anti-life. No, those decisions were made with the understanding that life is the greatest gift we have; that life is God's (whomever or whatever you believe God to be) greatest gift to each of us and that we make of it what we will. And, at the end of that great gift; when life becomes something more spiritual than real; more ultimately beautiful than bedpans and feeding tubes; yes, at the end of the days of our parent's or our sibling's or, yes, even our dog's (our precious children's) lives; at the end of the days of our loved one's lives, there is nothing anti-life in that equation when we, the living, nod our heads and agree that the pain must stop; that the obscenity of prolonging the pain must stop.

I've not run for four days now because my lower back is fucked royally; my hips ache immensely; I'm coughing and wheezing with the asthma I'd thought I had left behind more than forty years ago. But, life is good; life is worth the deal dealt. Life is ... a shot of Wild Turkey with a little 7Up just before bedtime. Huh!

No, I really don't believe Jesus had red hair. But, then, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that we found no WMDs; it doesn't matter that Tom DeLay is an absolute sleaze; it doesn't matter that Dubya's sixty city tour touting his social security fix is, well ... the ultimate Bamboozlepalooza of our time costing us -- the American taxpayer -- about $35Million; it doesn't matter that Dubya's out to get the United Nations and the World Bank. No, none of that matters.

What matters, on this day of Easter, is that I pray (hope) your family -- and not the President or the United States Congress or some judge somewhere -- will be the final decision-maker when it comes to letting a mother or a father or a sibling go on to a life that, oh, God willing, is as fantastic as what we, the benefactors of what began in a bubbling pool of primordial oooze, surely believe to be a better place where, hopefully, we'll all meet up once again -- dogs included. Blogs however... Well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Jesus didn't really have red hair, did he?





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