HOLIDAY EDITION

Note: Due to the holidays, Peace & Life Connections will not be published on the next two Fridays, and is scheduled to start a new year on Fridays in January. 

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It’s a Wonderful Movement

        Now a popular classic movie for the season, It’s a Wonderful Life shows George Bailey standing on a snow-covered bridge, ready to kill himself by jumping into the icy river below. Defining himself by his failures, at the height of his despair, he was visited by an angel who showed him what the world would have been like had he never lived.

        Let’s take that same approach with the pro-life and peace movements. What would likely have happened without us? 

*  In 1992, there were over 2100 free-standing abortion clinics in the U.S., but now there are fewer than 750. Without us, they may well have moved into shopping malls, and into or near public schools and private colleges. Infanticide of disabled newborns could have become commonplace, as the slippery slope from feticide of the disabled would never have been stopped.

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* As documented in Confronting the Bomb, nuclear weapons were at first considered just the best weapon in the arsenal. Over time, our actions made them taboo for using on people.

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* There would be no debate about paying for abortions in U.S. national health care – the government would have been covering them from the start.

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* The reaction to the September 11 attacks may well have resembled the reaction after the attack on Pearl Harbor – deep trouble for Muslim citizens, and more extensive war.

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* There would be no crisis pregnancy network to help those women who don’t want to submit to abortion, and even fewer government programs helping such women who made the “wrong” choice. 

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* There would be no conflict resolution skills training in schools, nor would mass nonviolent campaigns have developed to topple dictators and empires.

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Quotation of the Season - Anti

From A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

         “I wish to be left alone,'' said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”'

     “Many can't go there; and many would rather die.”

     “If they would rather die,”' said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

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Quotation of the Season - Pro

Martin Luther King, Jr., Christmas Sermon, 1967

        "The next thing we must be concerned about if we are to have peace on earth and good will toward men is the nonviolent affirmation of the sacredness of all human life . . . when we truly believe in the sacredness of human personality, we won't exploit people, we won't trample over people with the iron feet of oppression, we won't kill anybody."

 

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Happy holidays!

From the Consistent Life Board of Directors. Photo taken at our meeting in April 2009.

Bottom Row, Left to Right: Rose Evans, Mary Rider, Rachel MacNair, Carol Crossed, consultant Denise VanEck

Top Row: Linda Naranjo-Huebl, Ross Heckman, Bill Samuel, Tony Masalonis, Richard Stith, Michael Garcher

More recent Board members not in photo: Rob Arner, Jim Balmer