Wednesday, February 22, 2006

If it doesn't make sense, it makes a mess.

"What's good for the goose is good for the gander."

"What goes around comes around."

"You get what you pay for."

Life is all about balance. One of the first things a child learns is you have to balance front to back and left to right or you will surely fall every time you try to stand. The very act of walking employs controlling your balance. You can't go forward if your vertical baseline is overbalanced to the rear.

Gravity demands you take notice of her.

Reciprocity is another form of balance. That is the act of receiving "your just deserts." Paychecks are a form of reciprocity. At least they should be.

Modern purveyors of slavery, the owners and knowing customers of sweatshops and as well as industries that depend on underpaid illegal immigrant labor, trust that a whole segment of society is helpless and without a viable voice of defense.

We find the slavers as repugnant. We often do not seem to find their products as reprehensible.

When balance and reciprocity are knocked akimbo, the fabric of our society begins to shake like a ’68 Chevy II with the left front wheel out of balance.

You don’t really notice it at first. Twenty-five miles an hour and she rolls as smooth as the day you drove her off the lot. Even thirty-five is a nice ride, though the balance problem is quietly rubbing the tread from tire. At forty-five there is a bit of a vibration but nothing to worry about. Fifty-five and the steering wheel shakes visibly.

By the time you are rolling down the road at seventy your mind says, “Houston, we have a problem. We gotta take care of this or it will shake the whole car apart.”

It seems to me our society has a problem.

California just cancelled a scheduled execution because they can’t find a licensed medical professional who will administer a lethal dose of sedatives to the condemned person.

It shouldn’t be hard to find a professional with the necessary ethical and moral underpinnings to do that. All you need to do is find the individual willing to discount the value of a life. The process involves determining a life is parasitic in nature, without any redeeming value and most important, not have the ability to vote in the next election.

I find one other segment of our society falls in to that uncomfortable, zombie-world of the as-yet undead. Regularly ripped apart by medical staff, it looses in the desire of a primary client base to return to normality.

California cannot find medical professionals who will intentionally sedate a person to the point of death under judicial orders but seems to find no trouble in financing a whole industry that condones the horrendous practice of partial-birth abortions.

At the same time the California judicial system wrestles with an ethical means to take the life of the condemned, they are at the center of a Supreme Court case that seeks to protect the right to drag a late term child from the womb of the mother, crush its skull and suck the brains out with a vacuum cleaner.

A word to the prison system of “The left coast,” I know where to go to find your medical professional. Check out the nearest abortuary. They have no trouble in determining which life is valueless, champion-less and without a viable voice to protest. Their condemned can’t vote either.

Balance and reciprocity seem to be such a basic core value of life that I am shocked when I see one part of our society deliberately seek a position severely “out of kilter.”

Maybe they are trying to run.

I wonder where.