Explaining Abortion to a 10-Year-Old

It all began with a postcard from our older daughter.

She sends us postcards, real drop-in-the-mailbox postcards, a few times each week, with a little snippet or two about college life or something interesting she’s learned on them. The latest one said that a good portion of women who have abortions consider themselves to be pro-life, and think “I’m a good person who made a mistake, so it’s OK if I get an abortion.” But when “those” people get abortions, it’s because they’re bad people and irresponsible.

As I read the postcard to myself, her younger sister asked what it said, and when I told her, I got a question that I wasn’t expecting: What’s an abortion?

Now, the reason I wasn’t expecting the question isn’t because I was naïve. My daughters are nurse’s kids, and knew more about sex at age eight than many kids knew at age 14. If you ask us a question, we’ll give you the answer. Besides, just last week she was in the same room with me when I was talking about our church’s position on abortion with a friend, and she hadn’t asked any questions then.

And in case you’re interested, the last time I checked, the official position of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is that abortion is, and needs to remain a “tragic option,” one that is sadly necessary for some people in this fallen world.

But back to the main story here, when she asked me what an abortion was, I could easily have deferred that one to her mother, but she was asleep, and I figured that this was something that we needed to talk about right then and there. I was going to try to talk about it in the most neutral way possible, without hitting either of the rabid extremes, but coming from the uncomfortable middle, where I find myself, along with most other people in this country.

I don’t remember my exact words, but I explained to her that an abortion was an operation where a pregnant woman goes to have the baby removed, and it dies. I didn’t use the word “baby” over “fetus” for any political or ideological reasons. It was simply because I was talking to a 10-year-old, and that’s the term she understood.

When I explained this to her, a look of horror went over her face. Once again, not because of any particular political or ideological reasons, but because this is the kid who can’t walk through the mall without saying, “Ooh, look at the baby!” While she can imagine someone not wanting a baby (she knows that having a second kid was really not on my personal To Do list, and laughs at me for losing that battle), she can’t imagine anyone not wanting one badly enough to kill it. Her immediate response was “couldn’t they just have someone adopt it?”

Ah…in a more perfect world that would be the case. But I also took the time to explain some of the social pressures that might lead a girl to feel that she had to have an abortion, and that how, ironically, those pressures can come from the same religious people who are fighting against it. It used to be that an abortion was one way of hiding the “shame” that you had been having sex without being married. Or rather, of hiding the shame that you’d been caught. We all knew that people were doing it, we just didn’t want to admit it. Nowadays we assume that most people have sex without being married, so getting pregnant is only the confirmation of what we figured you were doing anyway.

In recent years I have been very pleased to see the baptisms of a few babies in our congregation who were the children of unwed parents. I was pleased to see that the mothers were not “sent to visit Aunt Sue for a few months,” but remained as part of the community, and that their children were fawned over just like any other new baby in the congregation. I was quite proud to know that our congregation isn't part of the problem that I told my 10-year-old about.

But I know that this conversation isn’t over yet, and while I really don’t want to talk to her about coat hangers, I know that I need to in order to put this whole issue in context.

And even though I’ve run long over my self-imposed word limit, the conversation here isn’t over yet either, and will resume in a few weeks as I think about a book that influenced me a great deal when I was in high school.

Today's Word is Theodicy

I’m back. Sadly, I’m back. Well, actually, it’s not sad that I’m back, but the event that made me drop everything else, and get back here to write is. You know what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t, then mercifully, you’ve been living under a rock for the past two weeks.

The word for today is theodicy. It’s a word that few people know, but a concept that’s as old as the hills; at least as old as Job’s questioning, and a concept that many of us have been struggling with since the events of Newtown. It is the concept of questioning how a loving, all-powerful God could allow such horrible things to happen.

Now, if you’re an atheist or agnostic (and nothing against them personally, some of the most moral people I know are atheists and agnostics), the fact that this concept and these questions exist proves that there is no God…or at least that if he does exist, he doesn’t operate the way that we’ve been taught since childhood.

There’s a bumper sticker out there that says “God is good. Evil is real. And God is all-powerful. Pick two.” It forces the theodicy issue to the front, especially at times like this, and it can be the statement that causes many believers to just pack it all in and give up.

And you know what? I wouldn’t blame them.

What? Did I just say that? A card-carrying Lutheran for 30 years, and an Episcopalian before that? A preaching deacon at our church since 1992, and the head deacon for more years than I can keep track of? Did I really say that?

Yes, I did. I wouldn’t blame any of the families who lost people two weeks ago if they said, “Screw this, God, I’m done. You weren’t there for us, I’m not there for you, because obviously you either don’t exist or don’t care.” I wouldn’t blame them, and I wouldn’t try to change their minds. Because the midst of such unbelievable pain is not the acceptable time to talk about Job or any other biblical examples of unwarranted suffering. It’s not the time to talk about how CS Lewis compared the pain we deal with for 70 or so years as being a pin prick when compared to eternity. It belittles the pain that they’re going through, and ignores their very real need to shake their fist at God and say, “What the Hell are you doing up there? Can’t you control your own people!”

Ah, control…there’s the issue.

Some of us on the religious side of the fence try to make sense of this by saying that God’s somehow stepping in to prevent tragedies like this would violate our free will. I’m not one of those people. To me there’s a very real difference between God stepping in and saying, “Nope, I’m not gonna let you do this,” and him saying “this isn’t what I want you to do.” Or to be more precise, him saying clearly and understandably “this isn’t what I want you to do,” because let’s face it, there’s a lot of misunderstanding and disagreement even among those of the same religion, same denomination, and even the same congregation about what God seems to have been saying, and means for us to do today. And there are a lot of us on the religious side of the fence who are just a tad frustrated with this lack of clarity which seems to be the root of so much well-intentioned evil; or this apparent silence which leads some people to figure that there’s no God in the first place, so who cares?

And come on, can anyone realistically claim that someone who is mentally ill has free will? Seems to me that that’s the ultimate loss of it. How would God be violating the free will of a mentally ill person (who doesn’t really have it to begin with) by stepping in and preventing them from doing horrible things?

The answer here is that I don’t have an answer.

What! I brought you this far, only to tell you that I don’t have an answer?

Yes. Not only that, but I’ve also brought you this far to tell you to be wary of anyone who claims to have an answer…because they don’t. None of us do. There are no simple answers to this question, and this is where a good read of the book of Job will put those who want to give simple answers that somehow put the blame on us in their attempt to protect their idea of how God works in their well-deserved place.

So then what do I have to say? Very simply, I find myself sitting here with you, yet again shaking my fist at Heaven and saying “WTF! Come on, this is no way to run an airline if you want to keep your passengers.”

But I’m also a stubborn little SOB, and I figure that there’s an answer somewhere that makes perfect sense, that ties everything together, and makes everything right in the long run; but I don’t get to find out what it is if I give up, say “Screw this,” and walk away because I’ve seen this happen too many times.

Instead, I take my cue from Jacob, who while wrestling with the angel, said, “I will not let go until you bless me.” Well, even in the aftermath of such incredible horror…again…I find myself saying “You’re not getting rid of me until I get the answer, until I see everything made right in the end.”

It may not be the answer that you’re looking for. It certainly isn’t the answer I want. But it’s all I have at the moment.

Truly Intelligent Design

I remember it was another pretty nondescript day in Mr Van Gilder’s General Science class 42 years ago at East Orange High School. It wasn’t the day when, after being caught not paying attention to a lecture on the weather, Curtis Brockman answered that they call the wind Mariah. No, that day was pretty descript, because I felt embarrassed for the poor white kid who just made a fool of himself in front of the 27 other members of the class…all of whom were black.

The day was nondescript because we were finishing up watching a film on the circulatory system that we had started the previous day. It was an OK film. I already knew pretty much all of the stuff in it, because I was a human body geek, and had been one since about 4^th grade. At the end of the film, the narrator came on-camera and said a few words about how the way that this incredibly complex circulatory system worked in this incredibly complex body meant that there had to be a designer.

Well, duh. Of course there was a designer…and it was God. Where was the news in that?

Apparently, this 14-year-old who could name and draw every organ in the human body, had missed the news that, aside from the occasional atheist, there was any question about whether or not God had made us.

And this 14-year-old knew and understood Darwin’s theory of evolution.

You see, to me, evolution didn’t necessarily mean that we lived in a totally God-less, random universe. Far from it; it meant that God was so slick that he set up this method to eventually create us, and that the stories from Genesis were told to and by people who at that point would’ve scratched their heads going “Mah?” (Hebrew for “what”) if you tried to explain to them what a half-life or a singluarlity was.

And I went blissfully unaware that there was any debate about this until I was in college.

I mean, yeah, we read Inherit the Wind in English class, but that was about people 50 years ago. Surely no one really questioned it now, did they?

Little did I know that not only did people still question it, but that college-educated people questioned it, and tried, and still try, with all their might to come up with some alternative thesis that would allow them to believe that the Bible was word-for-word, literally true, in the current translation…totally forgetting the fact that we may have misunderstood some of the original Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin.

And so these people went on to do what I call “science with an ax to grind.”

You see, real science does a few experiments, looks at the results, and says, “OK, until proven differently, it looks like this is how things work.” The Creationists, Intelligent Designers, and Young Earthers aren’t doing experiments and letting the chips fall where they may…they have a very clear goal, and that goal is to prove evolution and everything that the scientific community has accepted for years about the age of the universe, and our planet, wrong.

And this is so that they might “prove” the Bible to be right.

The Creationists and their ilk seem to think that science is trying to prove that there is no God. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Granted, there are a fair number of scientists who believe that evolution and an old universe negate the need for God to exist, but there are also quite a few who believe that the apparent randomness of Quantum Theory is where God and miracles hide from the view of us mere mortals.

And that, to me, is truly intelligent design.

Giftless Parties

My daughter, Sofie's birthday is coming up next week, and with that in mind, I figured I'd treat you to a reprint of a piece of mine that was published in the Syracuse Post Standard back in 2009.

Has anyone noticed the new trend of "giftless birthday parties?" We've been invited to three of them in the past few years and they're great. The invitation comes and says something along the lines of "Instead of bringing a gift, we'd appreciate it if you'd make a donation to such-and-such charity, which really means a lot to us."

I like these for two reasons. The first is that it makes my life easier as a gift-giver. Knowing how many useless and ill-chosen gifts my kids have received over the years at birthday parties, I strive to give what I call zero-footprint gifts. These are things that take up no space at all in the house, and include movie passes, bookstore gift cards, and the like. But giving to a charity is the ultimate zero-footprint gift, and teaches the kids that their birthday party isn't and shouldn't be all about what they get from their friends. I've come to believe that until they become teenagers and they all have a better idea of what their friends like, the best birthday presents come from family members.

The other reason I like this is because it now gives me a way to avoid all the useless presents that might otherwise arrive in my house, while also giving me a way to teach our daughter that it ain't all about her - even on her birthday.

Now in a previous generation, the great twin sisters of advice, Ann and Abby would've frowned on "no gifts please" invitations because it assumed that people were gonna bring gifts, and that was impolite. PULEEEZE! We all know that people are gonna bring gifts. We all know that the minute we receive the invitation, the first thing that goes through our minds is "What should I get this kid?" Sure, a gift may not be the "price of admission" to the party, but the person who comes without one sure looks funny. The time has come to stop pretending.

And that's the third reason why I like these giftless parties, no one looks odd when they come with only a card and no gift. In fact, if you're having a few financial difficulties, you can put off the gift of the donation until you're doing better (when you get your tax refund) and no one knows. Even better, this gift is tax deductible. Who could ask for anything more?

Let's hear it for more giftless parties.

Two Tubes of Toothpaste

Amanda and Joe got married this past weekend, and as a wedding present I gave them two little travel-sized tubes of toothpaste. You may think this is a rather strange gift, but I think it was a very important one. The card I gave them with it should explain why. It said:

There are two types of people: those who squeeze their toothpaste from the middle, and those who steadfastly believe that you should squeeze it from the end.

I say that each person should get their own tube.

When I first tell people about two tubes, they argue that that will cost more money because you’re buying two tubes instead of one. But it’s not really true. You’re actually still buying the same amount of toothpaste. The difference is that instead of buying a tube a month for two people to share, you’re buying two tubes every two months so each person can have their own. Either way you’re buying two tubes every two months.

But there’s much more to this than a simple lesson about shopping.

So many marriages fail these days because ask too much of it. Yes, you saw that right, we ask too much of marriage. I’m all for the bride and groom being each other’s best friends…I think that the best marriages are built on friendship rather than passion or hotness, the latter two of which will eventually fade away. Cheryl and I are each other’s best friends, but just as we each need our own tube of toothpaste – and different brands too – we each need our own circles of friends to hang out with every now and then. Sometimes those circles will overlap, and sometimes they won’t; but the moment that one of us expects the other to be our everything, and to “complete us,” we’re in trouble.

And that goes for everyone. Everyone needs a little time and space to themselves in a marriage, otherwise life together gets claustrophobic. And when things get claustrophobic, you find yourself screaming and clawing to get out.

We also need our own activities and interests to be involved in…which may not necessarily be shared by the other. If he likes Shakespeare while she prefers science fiction (in which case I’d wonder how they ended up together in the first place), he shouldn’t have to be dragged to every Star Trek movie by her, nor should she be dragged to every production of Macbeth by him. It’s OK to have separate interests, and not to constantly inflict them on each other.

Now, that being said, he should understand that he’ll get serious brownie points for suggesting that they go to see the latest sci-fi flick together. The same applies to her for not only suggesting that they go see Kiss Me Kate, but for also understanding that it’s a modernization of The Taming of the Shrew. But she shouldn’t get upset, and think that he doesn’t love her, just because he doesn’t want to go to the All-Night Star Trek Festival. That’s what her other sci-fi friends are for.

I don’t know how or when this trend started toward looking at our spouses as our “soulmates,” or of looking for a “soulmate” to marry, but I think it sets us up for expecting too much. Me? I was just looking for a nice girl who I shared some of the same interests and values with, who was nice to me, was smart, and funny, and was “low maintenance.” It’s important that when I met Cheryl, my first thought was that she’d make a great friend…and later, a friend that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

Too many people expect perfection in their marriages, and are devastated when they don’t find it. My advice to everyone is to expect less, and you’ll be amazed at what comes your way.

And while you’re at it, get separate tubes of toothpaste.

Black Like New Jersey

There are a number of misconceptions about New Jersey and people from there. Some come from people who aren’t from there, and others come from those of us who grew up there.

The first is that it’s a vast industrial wasteland. Now this is understandable if you’ve only ever driven along the New Jersey Turnpike, that 122-mile swath of highway that runs from just outside New York City to just above the Delaware Memorial Bridge. The entire point of the Turnpike was to move goods quickly from one end of the state to the other. And with only 18 exits along the entire route, it’s more of a route through the state than for it.

And yet, New Jersey is officially known as The Garden State, and while this may not be seen as easily from its other major highway, the Garden State Parkway, with almost 90 exits over its 172-mile route, this road for the state takes you through slices of suburban and rural New Jersey that people who only drive the Turnpike, mostly outsiders, never see.

But there are a few other misconceptions about New Jersey, and one of them is that everyone from New Jersey is like the people in North Jersey, or Northeast Jersey, just outside of Manhattan, to be specific. But the people who live in Southwest Jersey, near Philadelphia, might have a different view. And then there are the people who live in the shore towns, or in Northwest Jersey. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no one way to be from New Jersey. The people from Passaic are just as much from New Jersey as are those from Phillipsburg or Cape May or Camden. The people who order “pizza and subs” are just as much from New Jersey as those who order “tomato pie and hoagies.”

And you don’t have to love Springsteen or the Four Seasons in order to be a legitimate Jersey Person.

What’s my point? For my birthday, my daughter gave me Baratunde Thurston’s book How to be Black. After jokingly asking her if she was going to read every other chapter (my wife is white), I sat down to read this book myself.

I couldn’t put it down.

This was the book I wish had existed when I was in high school back in the early 70s. The problem was that Thurston wasn’t born until I was in college. This book pointed out that there are many ways to be black. To some people being black is about being from the inner city. To others it’s about being from the south. To still others it’s just about what ethnic group they are, even if they much prefer Rachmaninoff to rap.

In other words, there are as many ways to be black as there are to be from New Jersey.

I could’ve used this book when people, mostly my classmates at Ashland Elementary School and East Orange High School, accused me of “not being black” or worse, of being an “Oreo” (black on the outside, white on the inside), because I didn’t fit their narrow notions of what it meant to be black. This is a book that I’m certain many kids could use today, as they find themselves accused of “trying to be white” when they’re merely being black in their own particular way; one that looks more like the view from the Parkway than from the Turnpike.

And this is a book that I believe everyone, black, white, or purple, should read, before you go on making assumptions about what is and isn’t “legitimately” black, Asian, or even Irish.

My name is Keith, and I’m from New Jersey.

I’m also black.

Gentrification and Blockbusting

I had heard the term gentrification long before I moved to the apartment in Jersey City. To me it simply meant that middle-class people were coming into a previously run-down neighborhood, and were slowly improving it by their presence and efforts.

Others didn’t see it in quite those terms. They saw gentrification as something evil that pushed the poor out of affordable housing, either when landlords realized that they could charge more for the spots that existed, or when investors tore down entire blocks of what had been substandard housing, and replaced it with newer units for people who wanted to live near Manhattan, but not pay through the nose for it.

A few years ago, as we took a trip on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, we passed through my old Jersey City neighborhood, and I didn’t recognize it at all. 25 years later, the transformation had been that complete. The slightly dicey neighborhood I had lived in for a year was now beautiful, and I probably couldn’t afford to live there now myself.

However…I didn’t have the history with Jersey City that I had with my hometown of East Orange. I hadn’t lived there during its “better days,” if it had any, so I didn’t know quite where it came from before the gentrification started. As a result, I didn’t have an answer for those who thought that gentrification was evil because it displaced the poor. But looking at East Orange, where it came from, where it fell to, and my hopes for its future, gives me a whole different perspective on the whole gentrification issue.

And my new perspective is that gentrification and blockbusting are two sides of the same coin, with the former possibly being a correction of the latter.

Now, for those of you who are two young to be familiar with the term “blockbusting,” it’s really quite simple…and truly evil. It was the act of scaring the current middle-class residents of an area into selling their homes at a loss, and moving out, because “those people” are coming; and then selling, or more likely renting, those homes to “those people” at a profit. In the years after the 1967 Newark riots, a lot of blockbusting went on in East Orange, and a lot of the middle-class, both white and black, moved to “safer” places like Scotch Plains, West Orange, and Montclair. As more of the middle-class moved out, more of the poor moved in, and it became a repeating death spiral, to the point where what was once one of the wealthiest towns in the state has almost a 20% poverty rate.

But this trend can be reversed. East Orange can be saved, and it can be saved by something that has run right through the middle of town since about 1836. I’m talking about NJ Transit’s Morristown Line. As young professionals moved out of Manhattan to Hoboken and Jersey City in the 1980s because of its convenience to the city via the PATH line, East Orange, just a few stops away on the Morristown Line, may be the next stop for the Gentrification Express, as those two cities become almost as expensive as Manhattan.

“But what of the poor?” you might ask. “Won’t the influx of all these professionals displace them by making housing there impossible for them to afford?”

This is where I see both sides of the equation. Because I know where my hometown came from, I can see that while gentrification may indeed displace many of the poor who are there now, it would not be artificially and unfairly raising property values, but instead, would be bringing them back up to what they would’ve been, had the blockbusting and middle-class flight of the 1970s and 1980s not occurred in the first place.

And I can see so many reasons why a mass influx of the middle-class back to my hometown would be a good thing for everyone.

But that’s something to talk about later on.