Walls Are So Foolish

Glued to the TV, 1989
watching the Berlin Wall
meet its match in The People.

Walls never work,
though we continue to build them,
in the vanity of our own foolishness.

We build walls
to keep others out,
to keep some within ...

we build them
as a testament
to fear and bigotry.

Every wall built is a reminder
of our failure to live up
to our own best interests.

Every wall
shall fall,
sooner or later.

Every wall
will fail to curtail
the energy of freedom.

Though for a while,
a wall might prevail,
in the end, walls are weak;

they cannot contain the Spirit of God,
constantly moving across the plains
of the soul,

constantly
creating and recreating
in the darkness and in the dreams.

Walls are so foolish.

Art and Politics

It's all politics, really.
Art and preaching.
Writing and care.


It's how we think.
Shaped by the place of our birth.
The moments of hurt and happy.


The news we absorb.
The times, the stress and strain.
It's called history.


The stuff we live.
Our lives in private.
Or public.


The faith we profess.
Or deny.
Or somewhere in between.


We like a candidate.
They fit with our values.
What we hold to be true.


We see a world.
And say, "Go that way."
And that's politics.


Art is always expressing what the artist sees.
And what the artist sees is shaped by the soul.
A soul shaped by a billion small things.


A soul that can be dark and sad.
Or bright and confident.
Or, as is so much of life, somewhere in between.

American Tax Fetish

American's have a fetish on low taxes ... and what a price we pay:

Our infrastructure is crumbling.
Our health care system sucks.
Higher education costs are skyrocketing.
Public schools are dying on the vine.

Right ... but I'll be darned if I'll pay more in taxes.

I enjoy driving on lousy roads.
I like to pay astronomical deductibles, and if I can't afford medical care, well I'll just get sick, and then die, but, by gum and by golly, no more taxes.

I love it when youth are saddled with education debt; serves 'em right for getting so uppity.

I can hardly wait to send America's children to private schools, homeschools and charter schools. Enough of this public education stuff; sounds communist to me anyway. And in public schools they teach science, and that's contrary to gawd's word.

I love it when the rich take it all.
You bet.
They know what they're doing.
They're gawd's anointed.

So,

Let's cut health care all over the place.
Cut Social Security, too; what the heck, get rid of it.
Get rid of Medicare, too.

And all the stuff that supports the poor, the underserving, the illegals and all those other kinds of people who talk strange and wear clothes different than my all-American caps and jeans.

It's just socialism, and that means taxes, and that means I don't want it.

Am I a Murderer

Never an abortion" is just plain unrealistic ... so, what is abortion?

Is it murder as some might say?

As one meme put it: "whether outside the womb, or inside, it's still murder" ... and I thought, "or, is it?"

Obviously it isn't ... sure, it's serious, and every decision made to end a pregnancy is a serious decision ... driven by all sorts of needs and exigencies ...

Certainly, the wealthy will always have access to abortion, even "wealthy christians" ... though they have the means to care for a child, in ways that so many poor families just don't have.

I wanted to reply to the meme, but thought: "A nuanced understanding of what murder is and isn't, and what it means to have an abortion, can't compete with mindless absolutism, a mindset set unconditionally upon the notion that abortion is evil all the time, that those who support a woman's right to choose are murderers, and so is the woman."

So, no reply ... just a deep sigh, and the hope that somewhere along the line, reality and reasonableness might creep in.

As for me:

I support all the means we have at our disposal to mitigate the need for an abortion:

1. Free and easy access to birth control.
2. Sex education throughout a child's schooling.
3. Fully funded health care for all.
4. Fully funded public schools.
5. Unions for higher wages.
6. And a thousand other social devices to make life better.

And,

I support a woman's right to make her own choices - about what she wears, what she eats, and what time she goes to bed. Yes, and with abortion, too.

And, why?

Because I trust women to think it through and make a reasonable decision for themselves, those they love, and their future.

Does that make me a murderer?

Weaponized Prayer

After a less than pleasant phone conversation, many years ago, with an Oklahoma fundamentalist, she said, "I'm praying for you."

To which I said, "Please don't, because your prayer for me is hostile and adversarial. It isn't loving prayer."

I doubt if I stopped her "praying" for me, but I've subsequently thought about how prayer can be weaponized," i.e. telling God how to change someone according to my thoughts; such prayer isn't prayer at all, but an aggression, an aggression both on the gates of heaven and upon the person's spirit. And those who engage in such prayer actually draw further from God.

So, I'm careful in offering prayer ... to not weaponize my prayer life.

In this regard, I think that no prayer is best in selective cases ... leaving the matter in God's hands, which is very much a matter of prayer.

There's so much that I pray about, but even then, I say the person's name, or name the need, and then simply say, "Jesus my LORD."

No long-winded speech about what God ought to be doing with so-and-so, no wrestling with this and that, no pleading for God to give me something, or to give something to those I love ... no laundry list of dos and don'ts for God, and how God ought to be running the world.

Yes, I know the parables about prayer - persistence, and such, but as a matter of course, I avoid telling God what to do, though I've done that a time or two in my life, especially so when I'm praying for my loved one, or have found myself in desperate straits ... there may be such moments, but ordinarily they're few and far between.

So ... I work hard to let people and things remain in the hands of God ... by refraining from expressing my expectations and needs. I think most of the time this is best for me.

Perhaps others have a different calling about how prayer ought to be in their lives ... though I think all of us are tempted to "weaponize" our prayers, i.e to call down fire from heaven ... yet, like most any weapon, zealously used, such prayer is likely to cause serious harm.

Oh well, just some further thoughts about prayer ...

I Don't Pray Any Longer ...

I used to pray regularly for those who support the man-of-lies, but I don't pray any more.

There's warrant in Scripture for not wasting one's breath on those who have hopelessly given themselves to lies, illusion and fabrication.

They have built their wall, a wall dense and high, to keep out the truth ... and why they should do this is quite beyond me, but I suppose it was their initial commitment, because they were Republicans of long standing, or conservatives of some sort, that got them on board, and now that the train of madness is plunging ahead at full steam, they don't know how to get off, and so they defend the man-of-lies all the more, to somehow save face, ease their conscience and dismiss the truth.

It doesn't take much to discern the truth ... it's just a matter of looking at this man-of-lies, his greed, his sexualizing of women, his thoughtless remarks, his cruelties toward immigrants and asylum-seekers, his unpredictability, his bombast and confusing lines of thought, his greed and his self-importance.

I keep recalling that even as Berlin was in flames and Hitler dead, the die-hard Nazis remained loyal, and to this day, there are folks who still believe that Hitler was a good idea.

Well, that's life, as Robert De Niro put it in "Joker." That's life, and how sad it is.

I Shouldn’t Be Forced to Give Birth to a Baby Who Won’t Live

I Shouldn’t Be Forced to Give Birth to a Baby Who Won’t Live

Our baby had a fatal birth defect. My federal health insurance plan refused to cover the abortion.

By Sarah E. Levin
Ms. Levin is a federal employee in Pennsylvania.
July 3, 2019


When I was 20 weeks pregnant, I and my husband learned during a routine ultrasound that our baby had not developed a major portion of her brain and never would. The condition, anencephaly, a type of neural tube defect that also stunts the growth of the skull, is terminal. If carried to term, our baby would be very unlikely to survive for more than a few hours.

One in 1,000 fetuses have this condition. We had no warning signs. No indications. No idea this was coming. This was a baby we had planned for. Just three weeks earlier we had told our 5-year-old daughter that she would soon have a baby sister. We returned home from the hospital that day and had to tell her that her sister was not coming any more. It was the first time she saw me sobbing, unable to speak.

We made the decision to terminate the pregnancy immediately. Then came the roadblocks.

I am a federal worker, and the Hyde Amendment, passed by Congress in 1976, barred my health insurance company from covering my abortion, just as it does for the millions of other women who are federal employees and for the millions of women who are federal Medicaid recipients. The amendment allows abortion coverage only if the pregnancy will endanger a woman’s life or is the result of rape or incest. Some states use their own funds to cover abortions that don’t fall within those bounds. Pennsylvania, where I live, is not one of them.

I’m lucky to be a federal employee in some respects. I benefited from regular prenatal care that was entirely covered by my insurer. I benefited all the way until I needed to have an abortion, when my health care coverage disappeared — at the time I needed it most.

Because I was in my second trimester, my abortion this past June cost $2,500 up front, not including anesthesia and pathology testing; anesthesia, alone, usually costs an additional $1,100. If I were unable to afford the upfront costs, as would be the case for many Medicaid recipients, I would have had to carry my pregnancy to term.

Lost in the conversation about forcing women to carry to term is any acknowledgment of the mental toll it can have, especially on those of us whose baby is likely to be stillborn, as about 75 percent of those with anencephaly are, or to die shortly after birth.

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What about my husband, who would also miss work, share in our trauma, and require his own mental health care to work through his pain?

And then there is my 5-year-old daughter, who would have to bear my grief while watching my pregnant stomach swell for another 20 weeks, and know that a baby is coming, but not one who would ever be able to be a sister to her.

I was fortunate enough, despite the financial burden, to still have a choice. Some states have recently passed laws banning abortions.


Still, the decision to terminate didn’t lead to the fast abortion I had hoped for. First, I had to sit through the state-mandated counseling as laid out in Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act, which is designed to dissuade me from having an abortion. The law also requires a 24-hour waiting period after “counseling” before the two-day procedure could begin. My hospital provided counseling only on Mondays at 4 p.m., so I had to wait a week. That’s a week in which I felt my baby kick constantly, a week in which my family began to mourn a loss that I hadn’t even begun to grieve for, because how could I when she was still growing inside of me?

Waiting one week for the procedure was cruel. Waiting 20 more weeks would have been intolerable.

This abortion wasn’t a choice. It was an urgent medical necessity.

Unfortunately, the courts have sided with the government when the amendment has been challenged. In 2002, a federal worker who also had a baby with anencephaly sued the government for its refusal to pay for her abortion. She won the first case but then lost the appeal. That means that the federal government continues to choose to subsidize the increased cost of delivering a baby with anencephaly as compared to ending the pregnancy. Deliveries typically cost $30,000 and $50,000, and many anencephalic babies are delivered by C-section, which is even more costly and carries significant risk to the mother. Then there’s the medical care required during the short span of life the baby may have (very few have lived past their first birthday).

This cannot be what we want for our federal workers, their families, and for Medicaid recipients who are some of the poorest and most vulnerable in society. My employer, the largest in the country, made an immoral decision to refuse me healthcare. It imposed restrictions upon me that were founded on a religious belief — not my own — that hurts my ability to be a productive public servant.

Sarah Levin is a public defender in Western Pennsylvania.