see

a little something old for, you know. the vd...

i want you, my love, to watch me run,
to want to watch me intently
to see the measure of me in every stride.

i am not the fastest you'll see,
the heartiest,
the farthest from the starter's gun.

but watch me run and you will see the
heart that races faster than the others,
the mind denying all but what my legs require,
beating furiously to make the best of me,
who i am, paired with who i try to be.

watch my eyes as i tell you why i run,
see the weakness,
see the strength i answer it with.

watch me, and search my eyes,
in my moments of doubt and self-derision.

watch me, see the photos frozen,
the moments caught before they
trickle between our fingers.

if you see, and love what you see,
in those moments captured,
of doubt defeated,
of me giving myself a chance,
and trying to speak to a heart then unknown,
then it is you,
and here i am.

why we run in the rain

i remember the day that had shaken with thunder and frozen in lightning, that had been drenched by rains. one runner came, and chose to run. we went to the track together, and it was just her and i. i stood, and she ran. the workout was difficult, and she pushed against the resistance and the discomfort, but also against the rain. not everyone pushes as she did against the resistance and discomfort, but she did. and she was the only one that did it in the relentless downpour under dour grey skies. who would you put your money on, in a race? that day was one of my most rewarding as a coach.

but that was before. that was when running and coaching meant everything, before they were quickly and stupidly taken away.

when i run now, the memory of loss beats down on me, presses like high rushing water on my thoughts, exposes, seeps through and widens the cracks in my will, and floods my heart. i hear the things they said, i see backs turned to me, i remember what it was like to feel meaning, and i wonder how real that meaning could really have been. my feet grow waterlogged with sorrow. anger clings to my body, resisting the swiftness of my arms and legs.

but still, with the help of friends, true friends, i venture out, and i learn to run in these conditions, in the current season of my heart. and if i can keep running, it will make me stronger, on the road, and in my life. it's hard, and i decline as much as i accept, but it's all i can do.

so tomorrow, my friends and i are supposed to run, and tonight, the windows rattle slightly with the heavy peals of thunder. my cat sits leaning nervously against my leg. but unless lightning warns us away, we will run and be thankful for the test. instead of staring out the window and feeling helpless and beaten, we'll put ourselves out there, and we just may learn to love the feel of the rain and wind in our faces.

imagine how we'll run when the sun shines.

taper madness: it's everyone else that's crazy

February 16, 2006
(note: at the time i wrote this, i was an attorney at the state agency that regulates dentists. also, i quit my job the following week, after running my first marathon. that is another, much sillier, story.)

good afternoon, this is rob.

yes. yes, ma'am. i see. well, tell me what happ... oh, snap, i can see the finish line from my office. i didn't realize that...

what? oh, no, please, go ahead.

right. i see. so the dentist pulled the wrong tooth. because he was drunk. on absynthe. wow, that's different. real different. no, different is good. no, not so much for you, of course not.

ok, ma'am, i understand you're very upset, and in what you understand to be "pain." yes, ma'am, i made the air quotes. that was very perceptive of you. now, i grant you, you sound like you've got about 10 packets of banana blast gu in your maw, but i think you need to put this in perspective. now, i...

i'm sorry? gu? hellooo, it's a carb replacement energy gel. well, maybe if you turned off matlock and got off your ass, you'd have known that.

uh, no ma'am, i said... if jews turned over and cottoned giraffes, you'd have known that. no, ma'am that doesn't make sense, but it's ok, i'm a runner. i mean, an attorney.

so, look, i feel for you, but i mean, it's not like you've got, say, an IT band problem, or a stress fracture, or plantar fasciitis. heard of that? yeah, i got that. i get these pains in my feet that go up my ankle, and they annoy me and make me want to kick my cats, if it wouldn't, you know, hurt my feet. plus, they'll sleep next to my legs the night before the run and keep the hammies warm. no ma'am those aren't small hams.

you can file a complaint online, on our website. you don't need to talk to me. especially today. i mean... are you... are you talking to me? are you talkin' to me? cause... i don't see anyone else that's running a marathon this sunday.

you know, i shouldn't even be at work right now. i mean, what the hell? i need to be checking the news to see what the hell the hold-up is with sunday getting here. i think my calendar is slow. i should be home stress-testing my socks, and making sure there's no exposed elastic in the liner of my shorts. i should be hanging upside down in a vat full of icewater and listening to some ice cube, ac/dc, and mars volta to keep me mentally prepared. i shouldn't be here sneaking monopolova into my iced tea at work.

but here i am, listening to your petty problems. oh, a golf-ball sized abscess? oozing pus? yeah, well, i got a toenail i could show ya that'd make you gag. what? a fever? A FEVER? you wanna talk about hot - do you know the temp outside? it's 79 DAMN DEGREES! the wind is gusting up to 16 mph from the SOUTH! now, that's a freakin' headwind! what? why don't I wha... why in god's name would anyone be going north on sunday morning? are you mental?

it's very simple. i need sunday morning's temperatures to curve smoothly from 38 degrees at 7:00 am, to 50 at about 11:30. i need low humidity. and a tailwind. i was promised a tailwind. i converted to catholicism two weeks ago just to get low humidity and a tailwind. so help me god, and i mean that literally, i'll go aetheist!

no, i'm not spending taxpayer money staying glued to weather websites. i opened a personal credit card to pay a meteoroligist to sit in my office and give me verbal reports every ten minutes, freeing me up to study the course map carefully during my work hours. i don't know, he used to work in portland, then there was something about a career day visit to the local highschool. not important, except it made him a little more affordable.

so, you know, it's easy for you to sit there and mumble, with very poor diction, i might add, "look at me, my 72 year-old negligently mangled-mouth hurts, i might die from the infection. wahhhh." but sunday morning, while you're watching Faux News and gumming some pureed scrambled eggs, ima be at about mile 14, schvitzing through whatever nike dri-fit shirt i finally decide on, hoping the bandaids hold on over my nipples, and trying to focus on the hot girl in the black tights in front of me, hoping it'll distract me from the weird twinge of pain in my own left ass cheek.

yeah, you're damn right. no, don't cry, you didn't know. now you do. call me back on tuesday. afternoon.

out of time

time and time and time and time...

there's tiny pieces of paper, blowing in the wind around me, rushing at me, then arcing away in eddies, whooshing upwards on updrafts, swirling unpredictably in the vortices, the turbulence in the flow of time that our presence creates.

i reach to grab at the scraps, to grasp specific ones, or as many as possible, and the wind curls around inside my palm, carrying the slips across the landscape of my grasp, and safely free.

i catch glimpses through the gaps between my fingers, and on one, i see her, on another, me, so many other versions, iterations, of me, better, worse, but maybe only the better ones survive in storm, right?

time plays with us. this and that happen, two provident events, connected. but then time is added in, and two are now too far apart, though so close in every other way. love exists, and it's real, saturating it all, but time has shuffled the cards. i can see it across the room, but i can't get to it.

but it's gone both ways. i've been careless with time, arrogant. expected it to wait for me, hold up the smooth running of the universe so i could find courage, ask permission, decide, do. but cowardice was never overcome, permission was never asked nor granted, decisions were not made, and life didn't get done.

the debit column is just the past, the lump of time spent. time is just this thing, just another vector of force exerted on an object. but i can't fight it. i know it's coming, but i can't see it coming. and it keeps moving, swirling around me, carrying scraps of rice paper inked with events and catastrophies, comedies and tragedies, hopes realized and dashed, loneliness and love, all resistant to my grasp, the future slipping through my fingers and into the past.

the wind is quiet.

there - there she is.

tapering (five days to go)

A repost...

October 17, 2006

emails are flying between my friends and me. no work is getting done. emotions are high. we want to be in chicago right damned now, regardless of the weather (though we update each other on the forecast twice a day). we want to be running it now.

marathoners call it "taper madness" - the wackiness that ensues during the two or three week period before a marathon when we back off the mileage and let our bodies repair and become ready. i ask melissa, a psychologist, if there's a biochemical basis for the weird psychosis. hours pass, i get more emails reminiscing about our favorite coaches, about weather, and finally, "sure. but you are asking me to think in order to formulate an intelligent answer to that. and, i just can't do that right now."

so, i'm left to my own devices. i eat a banana, and stare at the whopping third document i've reviewed today. a normal pace would have me at 60 or so. why are we all losing our minds?
simply put, running is a natural ability, but training for and running a marathon is not a natural thing to do.

we train for 23 weeks. close to a thousand miles run - 30, 40, 50, 60 miles a week. we run four or five days a week. an hour monday, an hour tuesday, a hard workout for an hour and a half on wednesday, cross training or a half hour run on thursday, over an hour on friday, long runs for hours on saturdays.
those hours are squeezed into mornings before work, appended to the end of workdays when you feel like you only have the energy to open a beer and keep the couch from floating away.

people that choose and stick with this path are not likely to say, "I can't," and the training reinforces that. on the other hand, we say it more now than ever - "I can't, gotta run." "I can't, I have a race."

we push ourselves six days a week, for 23 weeks. exertion and fatigue become constants, as does the simple act of consistently, persistently committing ourselves to creating discomfort in our bodies and pressing on anyway.

"The will to win means nothing if you haven't the will to prepare." - Juma Ikangaa, 1989 NYC Marathon winner

it's a compulsion, and if it didn't start as one, it became one along the way. every run says something about us, who we are and what we can do - not about our speed but about our will. sometimes, we're disappointed by how slow we were on a run or in a race, because we're competitive and because sometimes we lose sight of the fact that the time doesn't matter so much as how hard we pushed ourselves to get it.

one day, during a particularly hard workout on a high school track, a kid leaned out a passing car's window, yelling some line i recognized from a movie about the day of judgment being on us, and asking, "how will ye be judged?"

the immediate response yelled back as i turned down onto the stratghtaway - "by what i do here today."

we watch the chicago marathon highlight video, and the sight of the runners and the cheering crowds shakes us. to some extent, it's adrenaline - fight or flight response positively subverted, adrenaline charges as we recognize the scenario. but we can't do anything with it right now, sitting at our desks, or at home.

we want the race, the pre-run jitters, we want to be surrounded by 40,000 other people who have made the same journey thus far, the same hegira from doubt and unchallenged limitations.

we don't know each other, we might not even like each other if we did, but almost everyone out there "gets it," and we are finishing a journey together, whether it takes us 2:10 or 6:10 to do it.

the thousands of spectators lining the course watch people go by, see the determination and pain, and to some extent, they "get it." some of them will be motivated, as i was two years ago, to make that same commitment, to see what they can make themselves do.

i think again of our head coach, saying that whether it's the first time you cross the finish line, or the 50th, you are not the same person that started it.

the clock, the calendar, are running too slow. my friends and i want and need sunday to get here, so we can do what we have worked so hard to do, as best as we can on that given day. we want to run, so we can cross the finish line and see who we will have become.

monday night blights

OK, so my friend and failsafe dinner partner Jane met me at Kerbey Lane.

First, let's get it out there: Kerbey Lane, at least at some locations, has come to suck. The South Lamar location is often laden with bad odors, as it was last night, and the bathrooms are so horrid that it seems inadequate that the frequently indifferent staff are expected to wash their hands in there. Self-immolation is the only really sanitary option.

The thing is, it's a block from my apartment. In fact, it's another block closer now than it was from my previous apartment in the same complex. It seems stupid not to go there, particularly when the veggie burger with veggie chili, cheese tots, and cold beer I had post-run four hours earlier is forgotten in the glare of a pancake craving.

So, there's this odor. It's worse near the door, near the restrooms, and it immediately occurs to me, as it usually does, that I've made a horrible dining mistake. We're placed by an only somewhat indifferent host in a booth on the far side, where the odor has diminished to what Jane believes might be the sort of vegetable soup that smells "like sweat" when it's cooking.

Our waiter shows up, and I'm happy that it's a kid that is more like waiters in Austin, and certainly at Kerbey Lane, used to be: personable, even fun, and not visibly annoyed at having to refill your fucking iced tea. In fact, it becomes a race to see if I can get three gulps from the tea before Kevin materializes at my elbow with a pitcher.

There's a couple in the booth behind me. I get a brief look when we pass. The guy sounds like a stoner, and then his phone keeps ringing. The whole time, while I'm rattling on and on to Jane about stuff, he's rattling on and on about stuff, only louder and more... dumbly. And, it's not the kind of dumbly that you can forgive, like from a small child, dog, or person that is doing the best they can with what they've got in the brainpan. Granted, this guy doesn't seem to have a lot more untapped capability under his long, contrivedly disheveled mane.

After lots of separate ringing gone unheeded, he finally answers his phone, and we're treated to his side of a loud conversation. Several times, in my increasingly curmudgeonly way, I half- turn, kind of a mix between "Oh, I'm sorry, I was concerned something might be wrong," and, "I want to beat you unconscious with your Samsung."

To her credit, the girl leaves almost immediately, possibly seeing her chance, possibly to smoke, possibly to have her own conversation, politely outside, or possibly to brave the bathroom. Eventually, finally, after an unbearable length of time, he ends the conversation. By this time, the girl is back.
He's doing well over 90% of the talking, to the point that, though an attractive blonde, she could have sounded like Mike Tyson or Mr. T, and I would never know it. I catch snippets, and he's talking about acting. I hear bits about football, bits about lines...

Then a couple sits in the booth behind Jane. He and his companion talk little. He's in a UT shirt and a ball cap. Their food arrives quickly, and the guy shovels his food in, with his fork gripped like you'd grip a homemade shiv as you jammed it into one of your fellow inmates.

This, of course, impacts or annoys me little. He can eat as he wants, and I won't judge him for it. He's not my date.

SNGNNNNNKT. NGT. HWOCK. I look up from my migas taco in shock. It's the guy behind Jane. No, this can't be. Jane tries to suppress laughter. I can get over it. But no... he does it again. And again. He is clearly on a timed regimen, making the really loud snorting-phlegmy noise with his nose and throat, roughly every minute and a half. When I occasionally catch his eye on accident, he looks at me with the sort of look that says, "Yeah, my pet possum killed your fucking cat, and yeah, I got $8 for the skin. What the fuck are you gonna do about it?"

Meanwhile, the few tidbits from behind me that survive the hocking across from me begin to piece together. He's not just in theater. He's not just some actor schlepping in local commercials and student films. No, this guy's got real work, regular work. It's what he does. He's not actually discussing working construction, he's talking about stage business. He mentions "not having lines in the last eight episodes." He mentions someone named Minca or something, and despite never having dulled my brain on the show, I finally put it all together. I look it up when I get home, and this is the guy. I'm much less certain about the girl, but this might be her. She was far less annoying, with less contrived hair, but her choice of friends/people to know/coworkers to hang out with raises serious questions.

I mention this later to my girlfriend Chirstina, who says, "Christ, what is worse than an actual asshole high school football player with a gigantic ego? A fucking LA actor with a remarkably larger ego playing a high school football player on TV."

I am myself confused by this duality in me: the person who is angrily annoyed at the behavior of the people infesting the world around him, that doesn't see any realistic hope for humanity's resolution into something even mostly worthwhile and noble; and, the love for and belief that any good in people is worth appreciating and trying to nurture.

My friend Amber finally put forth a theory one night, leaving a bar of frats and maneuvering through drivers taking any visible advantage for themselves. "Maybe you like people, but just expect better from them."

That is, no doubt, it. I expect people to be nice to each other. I expect them to make the occasional small sacrifice to help someone out, or just to be courteous. I expect them to be aware that other people are occupying the same space, space that is disturbed greatly by loud cell phone conversations and the harvesting of phlegm from their sinuses and espohagus. And, no doubt, maybe I expect them to not be so judgmental of the ones that fall short; that fall as short as I do.

Pink Mizunos Part II: When Short Facebook Responses Go Bad...

So, a friend who shared my previous post about Senate Bill 5 got this civil and honest response:

Agree with what he says about the process, etc. No one wants to win by circumventing the proper procedures. Most of what he said makes a lot of sense. Not sure if I agree that this particular issue will ever be one that people can debate without taking extreme positions. I mean, this is LITERALLY a life and death issue.

I understand that most pro-choice people do not believe a fetus is meaningless and akin to a wart until it hits the air." However, in my opinion his whole "Yes, abortion is bad but people should be able to make their own choice" argument is intellectually dishonest. For instance, the parent that loves their child but supports the right for other women to choose an abortion. How can those two ideals exist in the same soul? Abortion is the ultimate act of arrogance. It says, "My life is so important that the mere fact that your existence will cause me inconvenience gives me the right to end your life." All parents know that parenting is about sacrificing yourself for your children and abortion is the antithesis of that. 

Still, I appreciate the guy's point of view and hope that when the legislature reconvenes that the theatrics are past.

I sidestepped the fundamental issue of abortion itself in my post, because I believed that the focus needed to remain on the issues most immediately at hand: the bill's scorched-earth scope and disingenuous stated purpose, and the abuse of power used to do an end-run around the normal legislative process.

Points, lines, and running in circles

I do agree that abortion is a life-or-death matter. As much as I want women in particular to have complete autonomy and sovereignty over the affairs of their own bodies and lives, and as much as it is cosmically unfair that women, who continue to be the subjects of institutionalized inequality, are the only ones who stand to lose that control, I do believe that there is some point at which a society has to recognize, protect - and participate in the care for - a life.

But, aside from the inevitable, and I believe, small percentage of callous or thoughtless people, those who support choice agree that a life is at stake, but believe that the mother must be the one to make the choice of where that crucial point is.

So, believing in choice is not necessarily intellectually dishonest at all, because logically, scientifically, that point is unknowable. We aren't omniscient, we can't see a soul. No equation can really solve for it, no proof can be demonstrated, because it will always have to be founded on premises that are themselves arbitrary and unknowable, at least in this life.

We're left, then, having to define a point, a line of demarcation on which we can come closest to agreeing. The essential and necessary foundation of any proper argument on abortion, is the question of when life that requires a new moral, medical, and legal status, occurs. Shall we go with conception? Sperm meets egg? Certainly, some people have some good faith belief that that's the case. Is that a life immediately deserving full legal rights? Or is it when the baby is birthed and cut loose?

The governing law of the land in the United States, is, of course, Roe v. Wade. Its second-trimester (24-week) limit is based on viability - when a fetus can survive outside the womb - which, in turn, hinges on when the lungs can operate in the atmosphere. At the time, the Supreme Court found that to be 24 weeks - when air sacs theoretically developed in the lungs.

Hospitals through the 70's and 80's drew the line of viability at 28 weeks, because that's when the lungs start to produce a surfactant, which keeps the lungs from collapsing and sticking together. (there's a great Radiolab episode that addresses this, in the context of a great story that raises many of these questions about life).

But about a decade after Roe, an artificial surfactant began being used that could provide enough lubrication in the lungs for them to operate normally. That moved the line back to, depending on the hospital and doctor, 22-25 weeks.

So, clearly, the Roe v. Wade line is based on available knowledge, intellectually applied, but again, on the basis of a point at which a child can survive outside the mother, a line that technology will presumably be able to continue to move back to some extent. A law embodying some uneasy compromise was needed, and Roe tried to provide that.

But clearly, most pro-lifers were not happy with the outcome, wanting either zero legality for abortion, or at least believing that 24 weeks into a pregnancy is too far down the path.

Now, a few states are passing laws based on pain perception, which is now thought to occur at around 20 weeks. They are unconstitutional, but obviously done to try to continue to move back those limits and test Roe.

What are we really talking about?

If we're all concerned about how far out to draw this line, maybe we need to look at the numbers - is there a great mass of abortions pushing up on these points, having 24th, or even 20th-week abortions?

The CDC has studied legally-performed abortions since 1969 (under the kinda creepy name, "abortion surveillance"). The most recent report, covering statistics through 2009, found that:

• 64% of abortions are performed at 8 or less weeks of gestation (73.5% in Texas). At eight weeks, the fetus is 13mm in length. Eyes and ear-shells start to appear. Fingers begin to form. The heart is beating. A week ago, the brain had developed into 5 parts, and cranial nerves became visible.
• 91.7% are performed before 13 weeks (95% in Texas). At that point, it's been officially described as a fetus for two weeks. From 11 to 14 weeks, limbs are lengthening, genitals appear differentiated, etc.
• 96.9% are performed at or before 21 weeks. (It's 99.4% in Texas).
• Abortions are shifting dramatically to earlier points of gestation: "From 2000 to 2009, the percentage of all abortions performed at ≤8 weeks' gestation increased 12%, whereas the percentage performed at >13 weeks' decreased 12%. Moreover, among abortions performed at ≤13 weeks' gestation, the distribution shifted toward earlier gestational ages, with the percentage of these abortions performed at ≤6 weeks' gestation increasing 47%."

(Info on embryonic/fetal development from the Mayo Clinic.)

Abortion rates and ratios have been generally declining since 1990, but let's take the number of sheets of copy paper that the GOP presented as a stunt to distract from Wendy Davis' filibuster, representing the number of abortions in Texas in 2011: 84,601 (I have not verified their count, but let's just assume they didn't lowball it). And, despite the noted trend towards earlier abortions, let's still use 2009 percentages. And, out of fairness, let's put this in terms of how many abortions are still performed past those points, so that they yield numbers that have more impact for pro-life arguments. We come up with:

• About 22,419 abortions performed at 8 weeks or later;
• About 4,230 performed at 13 weeks or later; and
• About 508 performed at 21 weeks or later.

Performing surgery (and politics) with a chainsaw

So. Is this worth Senate Bill 5's nuclear solution, if we look beyond what David Dewhurst claimed his motivation was - the elimination of almost all abortion clinics - and examine what the bill claims to address: patient safety?

According to that CDC report, 12 women in the United States were claimed to have died from complications from legally-performed abortions in 2008. From 2004 to 2008, the mortality rate was .64 deaths per 100,000 legally performed abortions.

Yet, of those 47 clinics that Dewhurst was gunning to shut down with SB5, a number do more than simply perform abortions. Some Planned Parenthood clinics, many of which, were already decimated by the defunding of Planned Parenthood, which Rick Perry openly said was a way to eliminate as much abortion as possible, are included.

According to their 2012 annual report for just the Planned Parenthood Trust of South Texas, 95% of their patients in 2011 came for preventative healthcare - breast cancer screenings, pap tests, STI/STD screenings and treatments, and general healthcare, for women, men, and children. That's 34,160 patients for non-abortion care in south Texas alone. How many lives are saved and definitely improved by these clinics, against how many abortion-related mortalities (which may, for Texas, have been zero)?

The numbers don't even remotely support the alleged reason for this bill. That's why the bill was opposed by the Texas chapter of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, as well as the Texas Medical Association, and the Texas Hospital Association.

Perhaps more importantly for people who want to reduce the number of abortions: how many unplanned pregnancies were completely avoided? There are no numbers for this, but most rational people would have to believe that more abortion-bound pregnancies were avoided thanks to Planned Parenthood in south Texas alone, than were aborted at any time past the transition from embryo to fetus, across Texas.

And... back to language

Finally I have to say, I understand where the response to my post was coming from in terms of parenting being all about sacrifice, and I don't even have kids. But it is also arrogant and presumptuous to assume that abortion itself, and therefore all abortions, are "the ultimate act of arrogance," chosen because of "inconvenience".

By including abortions across the board, he was also saying that pregnancies from rape or incest, or that pose a real threat to the health of the mother, are also just "inconveniences" that don't merit the option of abortion. In case those seems like rare circumstances, a pair of mid-90's studies estimated that there were 25,000-32,000 pregnancies a year resulting from rapes in the US during those years. One of those studies calculated a pregnancy rate of 5% per rape. I would have to assume that incest numbers would be included in that.

It is difficult to find statistics for the number of abortions performed for the health of the mother, but in response to a claim by Joe Walsh (Representative from Illinois, not Eagles guitarist), the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists reported that about 600 women a year die from complications from pregnancy and childbirth, and that "many more" would have died had it not been for access to abortions. And, clearly, if that danger presents itself before viability... no living mom=no living embryo, fetus, or child.

Again, this is what I mean when I say that our language is important in issues like this one, unless you do, in fact, mean that rape victims and mothers faced with a grave danger to their own health are arrogant and merely inconvenienced.

I do believe that past some point of development, that abortion should not be an easy or careless choice. It is most certainly not birth control, and I don't appreciate it being talked about casually, or as just another right to be exercised without a need for responsibility. Personally, because we are human, and we believe that there must be solutions to what may be "misfortunes" in our lives, I'm sure that sometimes, it could probably be resorted to too easily. But in the light of what stages the vast majority of embryos and fetuses are being aborted, where flawed or even careless choices are being made, I do not believe that most of the resulting abortions are crossing that line of life that must be protected.

And, I know plenty of people who had abortions that regret them, and teen mothers like Wendy Davis who kept their kids and don't regret that. But neither the presence of regret in one case, nor the lack of regret in the other, mean that abortion is necessarily the wrong or selfish choice to make, in that time, and in that place. Rick Perry says "the ideal world is one without abortion," and there, he's right. But we're not in an ideal world, just as we're not in an ideal world where people don't feel the need to have a gun to protect themselves (and no, I'm not anti-gun).

So... how does it end?

The response above was not the only one I received. In the foolishly continuing hope that there is some reason in him that I can appeal to, I sent it to my stepfather, and while the response was short and un-detailed, it was clearly not well-received, and like so many requests for explanation from David Dewhurst, no response was forthcoming. A couple of pro-choice friends didn't really seem to get the point, either, sticking to the language that limits the motivation of all pro-lifers to the desire to control her body.

Most of the time, it seems that the only thing the two sides have in common, as in so many debates, is the need to take the easy path of demonizing the other side; the fear that acknowledging good faith in the opponent is weakness; the security of righteous anger; and, of course, ego. I find that sadder than any law that could ever be passed.

But there were also nods of agreement, from both sides. But, I honestly don't know... I can't see through the smoke of battle to see how many soldiers there might be on either side that are willing to come out of the trenches, disregard their flags, realize this doesn't have to be a war of good vs. evil, accept that there are things they can't know, and start to find a line that they can debate, but that doesn't have to divide them.