Chasms

Swami has met many people in his travels who believe what they believe deeply. They often care most deeply about the issues they believe separate them distinctly from evil. They are animated by that desire for good, but there are limits on how they fight that evil.

Take the modern American debate over abortion.

At the extremes of one side of the argument are those who view abortion as an innate right of a woman to choose what happens to her own body. Any intrusion on that right is an assault on basic democratic freedom and particularly an assault imposed by men on women. It’s an ancient gender suppression played out on a new battlefield.

On the other extreme are those who plot (and occasionally succeed) to assassinate abortion providers because, in their view, abortion providers are killers and killing them is an act of noble intervention.

In between are the rest of us who are unsure and uneasy with all absolutes, especially absolutes on this topic.

But the truth is that freedom-to-do-as-you-wish advocates are just as less sure of the absolute because almost none suggest aborting a fetus in the 10 seconds before its natural birth would be acceptable. So, despite the absolute support of the right, they see a limit because of reality. The fetus in the last 10 seconds before its emergence into the world may actually be a human being. Or maybe 10 minutes. Or perhaps 10 hours.

To support the aborting of a fetus just before its birth seems deranged, inhuman and degrading to the nobility we assign to ourselves. So we turn away from the absolute right.

Their argument becomes more one of boundaries than absolutes. It is the way humans divert themselves from unappealing absolutes.

But abortion foes also submit to the limited boundary of their argument.

If what their beliefs insist is true – that all fetuses are human and ending their lives is murder – then why do those proponents not hurl themselves into real mortal combat to save the child?

Why merely march? Why only hold up placards and chant protests? Why not emulate the most brazen zealots of the cause and seek out the killers to be killed?

After all, if you believed – really believed – that a child next door was about to murdered, almost anyone would launch themselves to save the child and attack the would-be killer if that were possible at all.

For example how could a "pro-life" consistently argue that abortion is murder by another name and not propose jailing all those who support it or charging those who perform it as first-degree murderers? Heard any politician make that case recently?

Maybe the answer is that both sides of the debate are less sure of the absolute rightness of their position or perhaps less sure they possess the real courage of that belief.

Though partisans at the far extremes control the vocabulary and the public face of the dispute, the vast many in the middle – most of us, really - may ultimately control the solution. We must be convinced of the rightness of any lasting solution.

Other cultures see this issue differently than we do. Other cultures see the soul differently than we do.

They have other solutions to the dilemma. Swami wishes us all well in the pursuit of those solutions.