Dear Lord, what will happen if this new xenophobia really
flourishes?
If you decide that sex is a toy
and babies are a totally separate event, the outcome of a choice, what happens?
Suppose you just get a quick little snip, a simple vasectomy. Maybe God gets
really annoyed and piles fire and brimstone on you. But I think it’s simpler:
if you get a vasectomy, you don’t have any babies. Sterility is a curse. The “punishment”
for this curse is … well, this curse.
If you choose abortion, then you have a dead baby. I can’t
imagine trying to figure out how to punish a woman for having an abortion. Abortion
is mind-boggling and wrapped in fuzz, but it seems clear to me that the outcome
of an abortion is a dead child. What lunatic wants to pile on more pain?
For years, it has seemed to me that the mark of an immigrant
is hope, innocent and unquenchable hope – or sometimes just a child-like
naivety, a transparent and unshakable belief that things will get better if
you work. It’s a mistake to call this child-like optimism mere naivety; this
thing survives shipwreck and desert crossings. It’s tough, like Emily Dickinson’s
generous little bird. I think it is truly hope. And this hope was, once upon a
time, the mark of an American. Now most Americans are pretty jaded, like
Europeans; but we have a flood of immigrants pouring in, marked by hope, and fanning ancestral dreams back into flames.
We can cut it off, close down the
fountain of hope. Do you know what happens if you let the isolationists close
the borders? The punishment is severe indeed: you don’t have new strangers in
the country.
Barren, haunted, and isolated. I
hope we get stupid too, or these curses will be too much to bear.