[Vision2020] Maybe it's the Percoset talking but . . .

[Joan Opyr]

Dear Visionaries,

I'm fresh out of Gritman Hospital, where I had my gallbladder removed 
the old-fashioned way, i.e., not laparascopically.  I've got an 
eight-inch incision and two endoscopic test holes, which have been 
closed collectively by 23 shiny surgical staples and one ugly suture.  
Ouch.  But I survived, and I am here to attest that despite Donovan's 
ignorant, dire, haberdashical ranting, Gritman is well-stocked with 
RNs, and these RNs are, in fact, paid significantly more than the 
average Wal-Mart greeter.  The ones I chatted with laughed at the 
suggestion that there might be some comparison.  There is an acute 
nursing shortage in the United States.  California is paying nurses 
$10,000 bonuses (in addition to their regular pay) to sign up for 
three-month visiting stints at public hospitals.  Gritman is working 
hard to attract and retain qualified RNs, and it's doing a good job.  
As for Donovan's charge that Gritman is using and abusing LPNs, 
poppycock.  During my six-day stint on the Med-Surg ward, I was cared 
for by RNs -- medication, evaluation, and consultation -- and CNAs, who 
took vitals, helped with the cleaning up, and measured the I & O, 
meaning they recorded and emptied the little urine "hat" on my toilet.  
Even if Gritman wanted to use LPNs, where would they find them?  WSU, 
LCSC, and Walla Walla are not churning out LPNs.  It's BSN or nothing 
these days.  (I think there's still an LPN program up in Canada, but 
Canada also has socialized medicine.  And caribou.  And people who 
speak French.)

I can also testify that the doctors who practice at Gritman are most 
definitely NOT paid by the hospital.  Oh, no.  The doctors bill the 
patient separately -- separately, independently, and eye-poppingly.  
Technically, I'm taking Percoset for incision pain; really, I'm taking 
it for wallet pain.  (Note to Michael Metzler: you need to ask yourself 
why you're paying Doug Wilson thousands of dollars to teach you how to 
make the same argument for the "nobility" of the Old South that David 
O. Selznick made during the first reel of "Gone With The Wind."  What a 
scam!  Listen, take your money and enroll in the WAMI Program.  You'll 
learn how to carve people into small, painful pieces and have them pay 
you for the privilege.  It's true that you can also do that through 
religion, but at the moment, you're on the short end of that particular 
stick.  Doug has cornered the local market.  You can't practice in 
Moscow; you'll need to move somewhere like Monroe, Louisiana or Cary, 
North Carolina, or . . . no, wait.  Damn.  You're screwed.)

All of which brings me to a point, of sorts.  I've been out of 
commission for more than a week.  I have, like Rip Van Winkle, been 
asleep.  But now I'm awake, and what do I find?  Here we all are, once 
again, talking about good and evil, slavery, zoning, retail, big boxes 
and Donovan Arnold.  Haven't we been here before?  I think so, and I 
don't recall its being a destination I'd wanted or planned to visit 
again, not like the Corn Palace or Wall Drug.  Yeah!  I want to go 
somewhere different, somewhere fun, so let me throw out a few ideas and 
see what happens:

1) The statement "I'd rather be a slave on a good plantation than an 
aborted fetus" is not only stupid, it's meaningless.  If you were an 
aborted fetus, how would you know?  You're not George Bailey, Michael 
Metzler, and this is not "It's a Wonderful Life."  What if your parents 
had never met?  What if Mr. Metzler's sperm had not met Mrs. Metzler's 
egg?  What if your parents had decided to make whipping cream instead 
of whoopee?  Once upon a time, millions of little 
Somebody-Else-Other-Than-Michael Metzlers went swimming up your 
mother's fallopian tube.  None of them were you.  Do they all have 
regrets?  Does each and every sperm-that-wasn't wish that it, too, had 
been Mammy or Pork on Miss Scarlet's plantation?  Whether or not you 
believe abortion is murder, this argument is dipshitacious.  If I were 
you, I'd nip it in the bud.

2) Let's jump back to Genesis for a moment and Michael's bizarre 
assertion that the Hebrew creation story is recreated via heterosexual 
sex.  No, it isn't.  The great innovation of Hebrew monotheism is that 
God brings the world into being just by speaking.  That's it.  The 
word.  The act of utterance.  Sex is taken firmly out of the realm of 
the divine and placed just as firmly into the realm of the human.  If 
you're thinking otherwise, you're thinking pagan.  There's nothing 
wrong with that, as my pagan friends will attest, but let's be clear.  
God is beyond sex.  That's how devout Jews, Christians, and Muslims can 
still be devout and yet believe that homosexuality is not a sin, or at 
least not an "original" one.

3) Before we engage in endless debate about the nature of good and 
evil, let's consider the possibility that neither exists.  (If we're 
going to play philosophy, then let's play for keeps.)  Plato viewed 
"evil" as a limitation of creation -- as that gap between the ideal and 
the actual.  When good and evil leapt into the realm of Hebrew and 
later Christian theology, "evil" was offered as an all-purpose answer 
to the question, "Why do the righteous suffer?"  What did Job do to 
tick off God?  Absolutely nothing.  He got it in the neck for no reason 
at all; well, except for the irrational reason of "evil."  For early 
and medieval Christians, evil was human; it was embodied in human sin.  
Consequently, it was good and righteous to stamp out human sin, even if 
you had to kill the sinner in order to save him.

The Inquisition, the pogroms, the Salem witch trials, and several 
million dead sinners later, we've come to the idea that evil might be a 
bit bigger than the individual.  Evil is genocide, or child abuse, or 
serial killing.  There are evil people, but they are evil because they 
act against a grand list of "do nots."  John Wayne Gacy is evil; Hitler 
is evil; Pol Pot is evil.  I don't disagree with this assessment, but 
then I'm presupposing that evil is the direct consequence of bad 
intent, and there's a problem with this kind of thinking.  Evil results 
from both action, i.e., Hitler's decision to kill six million Jews, and 
inaction, i.e., Britain's, the United States', and France's complicity. 
  According to some textbooks, as late as 1942, Germany was still 
willing to issue exit visas to Jews, but few countries were willing to 
accept Jewish refugees.  So, were Roosevelt and Churchill evil?  They 
were certainly anti-Semitic, and their anti-Semitism certainly helped 
drive up the death toll of the holocaust.  Objectively, in the face of 
all the good they did, on this count -- on the count of their inaction 
-- I have to condemn them.

Where does that leave us?  Genocide is evil.  So who's to blame for the 
genocide in Rwanda?  It had many causes and precursors: colonialism, 
religious difference, religious indifference, and the United Nations' 
and Clinton Administration's inaction.  (For what it's worth to the 
800,000 dead, Clinton has publicly apologized for this.)

I'm offering up a Vision 2020 challenge: before we argue about the 
nature of good and evil, let's first prove that good and evil exist.  
Let's prove it logically and empirically WITHOUT resorting to mere 
lists of crimes and criminals.  We all know that people do terrible 
things; we all know that people hurt, maim, and kill one another; but 
how many of us would be willing to state categorically and universally 
that hurting, maiming, and killing are always and everywhere wrong?  
God said, "Thou shalt not kill," and Jesus said, "Turn the other 
cheek," but St. Augustine turned both God and Jesus on their heads by 
arguing that there was such a thing as a Christian "just war."  (Pat 
Kraut makes virtually the same argument on this list day after day to 
justify the United States' actions in Iraq.)  So, tell me, what's 
always and everywhere good?  And what's always and everywhere evil?  
And why?

My own answers, of course, are "It depends" and "Because."  But I'm 
hoping that others can and will do better.

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment
www.joanopyr.com

PS: Phil makes a very good point in asking why just fight Wal-Mart?  
Why not fight instead to attract better business to the area?  But Mark 
Solomon makes an equally good point with his alligator analogy.  How 
can we fight for better jobs if we turn a blind eye to the "evils" of 
Wal-Mart?  Or, for that matter, Sodexho?  On what grounds do we demand 
higher wages and benefits?  Is Moscow, Idaho subjectively better than 
Bentonville, Arkansas?  I'd say yes, but you'll have to wait for my 
next Percoset to find out why . . .
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