Sex, Drugs, and Milkweed

As a deist baptized in a protestant church and separated by the Catholic Church by at least two generations, I withhold as much opinion as possible concerning the impending selection of Pope John Paul II’s successor. It’s simply not my place to interject my own theological ideas into a debate whose churches I have stepped into only as a freshman touring European with Core Abroad. My inquiries into whereabouts of the “Sunday school” rooms were in the St. Jean Cathedral in Lyon attests to the breadth of my native ignorance of the Mother Churches ways.

Though my knowledge of Vatican II and Canon Law are as profound as my understanding of a woman’s mind, I had a lot of respect for John Paul II. His moral conservatism was of a different strain than what I encounter in America. Though I disagree with his view on abortion, I respected his moral consistency that had him fight against unjust war, torture, and the death penalty just as hard with the same underlying principle that life is sacred.

The only complaint I feel comfortable in vocalizing is the churches ban on contraception. Modern alchemists have turned milkweed and poinsettia plants into one of the most cost effective birth control measures of all time, stopping both STD’s and unwanted pregnancies if used correctly. John Paul, however, issued several fatwa’s banning Catholics from using condoms. Our Malthusian population nightmare aside, one can imagine the decree this has had in Africa, Catholicism’s fastest growing demographic. Over twenty-five million sub-Saharan Africans are infected with HIV/AIDS with an infection rate of 7.5%. It is of unconscionable bad taste to exalt a single command given to a nascent human race over the entire theme of compassion that AIDS; another 2.4 million children are infected themselves. What would Jesus do?

John Paul II’s moral consistency was matched by only by his rigidity. What will taint his legacy more than the scandals amongst America clergy was this iron-willed persistence in damning Catholics who practiced birth control. Granted, God had some good words to say back in the day about fruitfulness and multiplicity. Those words were exceptionally relevant as late as 1492 when the Europeans had just found a new patch of grass to soil and the world population was still under 500 million. I just don’t know how much more fruitful God wants us to be in an age of 6 billion people. The founders of the Universal Church made a decision some two thousand years ago that even though Biblical law required circumcision, things, you know… changed. Three times as many people live on under $1 a day as lived on the planet when the Good Man himself preached in Judea. I think it’s fair to call God’s “Go Forth” campaign a complete and resounding success. We should at least put the program on pause until the polar ice caps melt and become habitable.

There is hope yet. Cardinal Tettamanzi of Milan, Vegas’s favorite to win the papacy, has been quoted as saying, "one African child sick with AIDS counts more than the entire universe." He has called on Western nations to contribute more to the fight. His economic stances are in line with international calls to de-commercialize the AIDS-drugs industry and provide zero-fee licensing for generics. It would be an amazing step forward to make a religious imperative out of treating AIDS victims, as Tettamanzi suggests. I counter that preventing the disease is even more important. The pride of the Church is at stake, especially after taking such a hard line for so long, but the next pope could slowly back off the official. He doesn’t need to recant the Church’s contraceptive policy – merely shying away from reinforcing it every chance he gets would be a tremendous help. After all, would Jesus spend more time arguing for the banishment of modern hygienic techniques or would he spend his time preaching love for all?

Terry Shaivo [unfinished]

Originally, I wanted to make this column another partisan rant about Terri Shiavo in league with everything else filling the airwaves and op-ed pages of newspapers. I wanted to point out the ethical obscenity of a political party that has no problem having Medicaid paying most of the $80,000 a year medical bills of a brain dead women but refuses to discuss the possibility of making healthcare a not-for-profit industry like every other industrialized nation has. I wanted to dwell on how sad it is to see this helpless soul caught in the first bout of 2006 campaign posturing but then I realized I would be playing right into that very game and skirting more important issues.

Despite 65% of Americans realizing that this more a political circus than a morally driven crusade, most of us are genuinely concerned over the repercussions it will have on the American political landscape. This media circus spotlight on Shaivo highlights the deepest philosophical and ethical debate of our time: what is life worth and how equally distributed is that worthwhility?

To break my view of the Shaivo circus down to its crudest and truest form, it is my contention that in a world as ours of finite resources and starvation it is not worth the time or money to sustain the breath of a woman brain-dead for 15 years. Being that she has lost sentience – the ability to comprehend her own existence - she is merely a shell of human life. She is propped like a puppet with tubes instead of strings, complete with involuntary motor reflexes reacting to stimuli that captivate the true believers who desperately want to see consciousness churn beneath her eyes

My own feelings on the Shaivo case have begged difficult questions. Does a paralyzed deaf, mute, blind and severely retarded man have the same right to live as I do? What exactly would be the cognitive cut-off point where someone begins loosing their rights? Who decides?

I don’t think the questions get any easier for the right-wingers backing Shaivo’s parents. One could vaccinate 28,500 children in impoverished nations with the $80,000 a year it takes to keep Terri Shiavo breathing. That speaks nothing of the 43 million Americans without health insurance. The pro-life movement seems concerned with life only when it appears as a glow, a waxing or waning of pre-birth and near-death. What about preserving the life we already have?

Underling this entire debate is a perforated fantasy that almost every American believes in: no human has the right to kill another human. The holes become wider after terrorist attacks and serial killings. The holes become indefinable and smaller when it comes to civilian death in war, “collateral damage,” or unhooking the elderly from breathing tubes, or terminating pregnancies.

All life is not sacred to the vast majority of us. We pick and choose our [unfinished because it was unpublished [Richard wrote an editorial on this very topic to my surprise])

In Memory of Gonzo

Though Dr. Hunter S. Thompson nauseated most, he intrigued the rest of us through his undiluted and manic caricature of the American Dream marked with a hedonistic realization of the pursuit of happiness and a self-authoritarian styled liberty of conscious few will ever acquire. Dropping ink and acid lavishly, he chronicled the excesses of American culture - Vegas, Nixon’s re-election campaign, biker gangs, etc - by living through them in a detached psychedelic haze rich in absurd details provoked largely by his own interactions. His death was but a detour of a wildly self-destructive life where he always remained firmly in command of his own downward spiral.

Social Security Reform

After I blew out the transmission in my first car (a Ford, imagine that) my father asked if it was doing anything funny before the final death throw. I told him yes, but that I just didn’t have the money to fix it and would rather suffer the drivetrain oddities than shell out cash from my anemic McPaychecks. He told me something that I’ve followed to this day: fixing problems early is hella cheaper than waiting until the entire system collapses.

Accordingly, I applaud Bush for pushing Social Security reform. Though the devils are in the details and I might not agree with him that the system is heading for guaranteed solvency in coming decades, I do believe the margins of error are too tight for comfort. I applaud him for having the political courage to reach out, touch that political third rail, and look at a problem before it blows up in our collective faces, potentially costing our generation the social safety net we are expecting.

Democrats should take a skeptical stance right now, in contrast to unflinching opposition. This is an assured method to be left out of the negotiation process. I earnestly want to believe Bush when he said he was open to any suggestion that allows for some sort of private account, does not raise payroll taxes, and is not a temporary solution. These are terms that Democrats should agree to on an ad hoc basis for the sake of coming to an acceptable compromise with a hesitant Republican majority.

Much the same as with Bush’s original tax cut proposal, his numbers are elephantine (and economically disastrous) on purpose – starting on higher ground to wage battle so that the inches ceded leave him with a result closer to his original goals. Allowing the Social Security to have its income slashed by 65% (4% of income, which will come out of the 6.2% payroll rate) would bankrupt the system as we know it. Though guaranteeing funding, albeit smaller than current payouts, for current freshman, it would nonetheless axe benefits for the non-traditional students. Already well into their careers, they have subsequently not had time to significantly pay into these accounts before costs exceed revenues in 2012 because of the accounts.

Bush purportedly has not ruled out raising the ceiling on taxable income. Currently, Social Security dishes out benefits proportional to what workers put in while they worked. In a bit of regressive-tax logic, only the first $90,000 of income is taxable – maxing out at $5580 a year. In raw numbers, that means that most liberal arts UNF graduates will be taxed 6.2% on all income, while an MBA peer making $900,000 yearly is only paying a tenth your tax rate at .62%.

Depending on Republican momentum on this issue, it is likely Democrats will have to make a “deal with the devil” to ensure the survival of America’s largest entitlement program’s. If allowing for small private accounts is necessary to eliminate the taxable income bar and make other steps necessary to ensure the programs solvency, , then that's a deal that should be made.