Conviction

Secular Pro-life and Bad Catholic have both recently blogged about something that has been bothering me for awhile. How can we, as pro-lifers, go about our daily lives knowing that millions of our fellow human beings are being brutally killed every single day? Not only that, but in Canada, my tax dollars are paying for these atrocities. And yet I still pay taxes, and I happily take advantage of everything else my tax dollars pay for.

How can we pick just one day to protest and, after a few hours, go home feeling satisfied since more people came than last year?

Why aren't there more people who are willing to passionately
witness against abortion? Why am I not more like her?

Sometimes I just feel that we are remarkably useless. Even though I know that every voice who rises up, every person who peacefully protests, every individual who speaks up online or in person, makes a difference, I still feel as if we (or at least, I) have no real conviction. All I know is that I really do understand how atrocities in the past were allowed to happen. I understand how people could have supported chattel slavery, or the holocaust, or infanticide. I understand how slave owners could have brought themselves to brutally abuse "their" slaves, I understand how "Dr." Mengele could have experimented on children, and I understand how the Greeks and Romans could have left their newborn babies to die in the wilderness. I understand because I see it happening today with abortion, forced abortion and gendercide, human trafficking, poverty, and the millions of other tragedies that happen every single day. People justify them, or ignore them, or dehumanize the victims, or convince themselves that it can never happen to them, and then get on with their lives. I am guilty of this too, and I don't see how I could function normally if I wasn't. How can one live day-to-day constantly thinking about everything that is wrong with the world?

Just some food for thought.

From Secular Pro-Life: Is it really so hypothetical?

[in response to a hypothetical situation where an organization chucks two-year-old's into a furnace, and pro-lifers do nothing but say how awful it is]

"People have to live with these kinds of contradictions every day, actually. It's not like people three hundred years ago had no idea how bad the slave trade was. It's not like Americans in the nineteenth century didn't know how awful the Trail of Tears was. It's not like Germans under the Nazi regime really thought it was okay to lock up millions of Jews in concentration camps. These things really happened, not because people were so different from you or me. They happened because normal people like you and me aren't so wonderful as we think we are. It's remarkably easy to justify evil."


From Bad Catholic: Why I Don't Care

"If the March for Life was a march of human beings who saw other human beings as normalizing and legalizing the murder of infants, there would be cars burning in the street. As it turns out, there is no protest in the present age. There is only representation. There is no foolish human action. There is only the support of abstractions. Infants are being killed - we follow the lines the police allow us to follow."