続ける意味

Three things.

Firstly: Yay yay yay -- in fact, perhaps this calls for a randomly generated obscure interjection: voetsek!! Uhh yeah no idea what that means, but let's assume it means "yay!". Anyway: I'm sure this is more exciting to me than it is to whoever is reading this, but today after school as I was leaving I glanced down the hallway, and some girls from the ping-pong team were clustered near the student entrance, and one of them (a first-year girl I think) was reading the poster of English tongue twisters I put up on Monday! This makes me happy. Maybe I'll actually be motivated to make something else in the next couple weeks. ^_^

Secondly: I wrote a poem. But, posting poems is embarrassing, soooo here's a Babelfish version. As always, this was edited from the translation I was given using only backspace, enter, and changes of capitalization.

All right.
Remove the remainder.
The pupil of green, statistic of time
wasteful, foolish, excessive,
don't you think?
It is congested, separated.
All sunsets are obstructed from you.
The only flower of the world is her smile.
It is complete.
Right?

Wrong.
She does not complete me.
But without she, laughter is the sky,
the world meaningless
each victory loneliness
each sunset excessive.
She keeps perplexity together;
She is infinity, the asymptote
you reach.

Yeah it's not great. Neither is the original. But hey, I wrote something! Zounds!

Thirdly: I just watched the unedited interview with Mike Huckabee from the Daily Show a couple weeks ago...and it made me want to scream. In particular, it made me want to scream the following rant:

Look. Abortion is a damn complicated issue, I get that. I don't want to sound like I think that I alone of everyone in the world have figured out the correct answer to this question. But every time I hear people talking about abortion I have this intense, suffocating feeling that, even more than with many other "political" issues, the framing of the debate is completely wrong and designed to lead nowhere. As Jon Stewart points out in the interview, the rhetoric seems to be trying to lead us to believe that anyone who isn't "pro-life" is anti-life, and just doesn't really see what the big deal about abortion is -- after all, it's just a fetus, right? The argument is often framed like if you believe that aborting a pregnancy is a bad thing, you will logically be in favor of making abortions illegal.

Well yes, on some abstract level that is logical, perhaps, but the world isn't on some abstract level. This is reality here, and the reality is that if your ultimate goal is to minimize the number of abortions, debating the legality of the procedure is not necessarily the most effective place to start. And anyone whose goal is not to minimize the number of abortions -- no offense -- has issues. I'm not saying the moral arguments aren't powerful and maybe important, and if people want to spend their free time sitting around trying to convince each other that "life" begins at such-and-such a point, or giving speeches about the sovereignty of a woman's body, then fine. But at some point, it seems that people ought to get together and give some thought to how to actually best reduce the number of abortions, and how to make sure that those that are performed are clean, safe, and don't put the woman at extra risk. (Opinions may differ on that last point I guess -- for someone who strongly believes that abortion is akin to murder, the health of someone who chooses to have one might not be a huge consideration.) And I am no expert -- I don't have statistics readily available to quote, I haven't done extensive research into the matter -- but it feels pretty obvious to me that to reduce the number of abortions, some good steps would be better sexual education, more readily available birth control options, and more support for mothers who do go through with the pregnancy, such as affordable daycare or a good adoption system (hey, here's a thought, perhaps there are some gay couples out there wishing they had a child to raise...).

Yes, those things take time, effort, and money, and even worse, involve admitting that teenagers are going to have sex no matter what you try to tell them. But By simply making abortions legal without working to address any of the underlying reasons that so many people feel the need for an abortion, you're just creating unhappy and potentially dangerous situations.

I am in favor of legal abortions. I am also in favor of sex ed that teaches kids how to think about sex in a mature way, how to make their own decisions about it, how to turn it down, and how to have it and enjoy it without a high risk of pregnancy. I am in favor of gradually working to diminish the aura of shame that surrounds anything sexual, so that perhaps when accidental pregnancies do happen they will be less likely to lead to tension, anger, and guilt. Of course, there are plenty of people who would tell me that better sex ed and easier access to birth control are not viable solutions because teenagers should not be having sex, period. If that becomes the argument, then I'm happy to dig in and disagree and stand up for my opinion. But to me, these questions are separate from the big moral/spiritual questions about what constitutes life, whether fetuses have souls, whether the government has a right to ask a woman to support another life with her own body. I don't know those answers. I have opinions, but I think people can reasonably disagree. But while we're disagreeing, I wish we'd focus on a more constructive debate about what's actually practical, what might actually work.

Okay. Rant over. Time for dinner. ^_^ Oh, but here are some lyrics, courtesy of BUMP OF CHICKEN (no connection, the song just happens to be in my head):

大切な人に歌いたい
聴こえているのかも　分からない
だから、せめて、続けたい
続ける意味さえ　分からない