Mendacious Questions

In milady's absence I attended one of her discussion groups last evening as her pinch-hitter. This is a monthly get-together of friendly folks, nearly all of whom agree about how the world's vital problems ought to be solved. That is, they are of a liberal, world-centric view. The group has a workbook purchased from a like-minded organization in Oregon. Each month, they read ahead one of the chapters in the manual, then get together to discuss the shade meanings each of them has derived from the reading.

The title of this month's chapter was, "Swimming Against the Tide," but a quick read through of the topics seemed to indicate the material had been selected with pleasing the likely readership as its primary criterion. I doubt that any of the people there -- about 15 of them -- would have found much to disagree with in anything offered by the reading.

But then came a question posed by the moderator, a lady veterinarian from over in Sperryville. "If you were a Congressman and had to vote on a bill that would provide a cure for a communicable deadly disease but would result in the extermination of all bears in the world, how would you vote?" Predictably, most of the group voted in favor of the bears, but a few, apparently guided by a subconscious leeriness, dodged the question, hemming around that they couldn't possibly imagine such an alternative. One person who spoke before my turn came, 'lowed as how the question was not precise enough. It had not indicated what portion of the human population would be killed by the disease. Lacking such information, the question could not "rationally" be answered.

I must admit that I had been intending to answer differently until I heard that comment. Immediately, though, this thought came up, and I expressed it: It wouldn't matter to me how many people were going to die. If the number was only one, and the one was my granddaughter, for me the choice would be easy. And given that everybody in the world is somebody's grandchild . . . .

Later, driving home, it occurred to me that my answer was a bit on the nervy side. Sure, we don't like our ox to be gored by the decisions of others, but real world circumstances do come up in which choices of that kind have to be made by someone. In fact, if any one thing can be said to be true of the human condition it is that having to make hard choices of that sort is always going to be with us, and that no amount of wishing it were not so is going to make the problem go away. Life will always retain some of its bitchiness.

Then the Academy Awards show came on and I was immediately reminded of the emotional certainty presented by the movie The Constant Gardener. [Rachel Weisz won for her role in the film.] Life may be a bitch, and painful choices may sometimes have to be made, but needlessly sacrificing human lives to benefit other human lives will never be a choice permitted anyone. Genocide, whether for "humanitarian" purposes or not, will always be a mortal sin.

That doesn't mean that life's not stll a bitch. It does mean that some behavior is always wrong, and the systems that seem to justify those behaviors are themselves, to that extent, also mortally sinful.

Easy to say . . . until you wake up to the fact that the "system" committing those sins is sometimes yours, the one you have put in place by either your active vote or your ineffective or passive resistance. When we finally see that, and are driven into remorse by the finding, perhaps it is then that we become truly human.