Abraham Biggs: Another Casualty of the Culture of Death

He took an overdose of pills in full view of web camera peeping Toms. They watched. They commented, some encouraging him toward his demise as if it were just another television show. And no one thought to call 911 until it was too late.

There was no nick of time when the police burst into Abraham Biggs' bedroom curled up mortally.

The thinking American public is so shocked. How could this happen?

How could it not happen is the more accurate question.

As Abraham, age 19, is buried, an adult, a mother, named Lori Drew, will probably be acquitted of driving a 13 year old to her death using the internet. They have no on point crime to fit what she did.They had to cobble together a few felonies already on the books. With her own daughter and a friend, she created a young man who wooed a teenager and then turned on her. She hung herself.

When a child in a womb, right up to nine months, is fodder for dismemberment; when one that survives the invasive assault and comes out of the woman and is left to expire on some cold table, lacking legal personhood although not actual existence, when at the other end of life, statutes are passed to allow someone to die "with dignity", the line for when dignity begins and ends a relativist's dream, why are we surprised when the encroachment approaches those of us in the middle of the bracket between beginning and end?

People don't like to hear about the "slippery slope". Heck, we are well down it and these hot news events of a teenager who throws her newborn into a dumpster, or a woman who leaves a person she hit impaled in her windshield in the garage to die, or an Abraham Biggs, these are natural to the slide.

If your value or my value is a matter of someone else's determination, not God's, not Natural Law's, then we are all at risk in the lying name of "choice".

Perhaps we should worry less about tobacco and more about the deadly euphemisms with which we are killing ourselves and others.

Expectations of a Super-man

I was going to take my own picture of this poster, another version of which, enlarged, is now over the T-Shirt Shop on Melrose Avenue. I found it, not easily, on line. I was actually surprised, since I have seen it in my travels a lot in Los Angeles, that it did not have more coverage nationally. Or maybe I just missed it.

Friends of mine who know I was inclined toward McCain have gently approached me to assess a mood about the outcome of the election. They seem to expect some kind of ruthless rage. I don't know why. I can speculate. But I won't. Maybe they figure that most of us in the 47 percentile will put up our version of the sign I used to see in various locales, including my office, about soon to be former President Bush, "He's not my president" accompanied by a Mad Magazine big eared version of his face. I took my McCain-Palin sticker off my car on November 5, and I am now, in my little, non-Washington non-insider way, a member of the "loyal opposition". That's how I view it. He's got the role. I respect the role and thus, the burdens of the man who is in it. And I wish him Godspeed. Yeah, I'd like him to shift on some of his positions. Maybe he will, or maybe he won't. But he's got the big job, and he deserves respect, and a chance. But back to the picture of President Elect Obama as Superman. It's hard enough to be President, but coming in with the aura of being more than human? Whoa!

There is some simplistic idea out there, despite Political Science 101 courses that surely many of the young kids who voted for him had to have taken, that the President can wave his arms and effect the promises that are ab initio generalized hyperbole. He's going to get us out of Iraq, toute suite. He's going to close Guantanamo, he's going to sign FOCA and finally shut up the pro-lifers in the states, he's going to cut taxes of many Americans, particularly apparently the ones who don't pay taxes right now. He's going to solve the economic downturn that had its genesis in the early 1990's, you know, during another Democrat administration. I don't know if he's one for the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, so that for every Conservative Talking Head, there will be the concomitant Liberal Talking Head to counter, no doubt in high decibels.

He is going to have to leap tall buildings in a single bound and right over the heads of any opposition, and be faster than a speeding bullet indeed so they don't see him coming or going.

Me? I am hoping that faced with the reality of what I still think are checks and balances and the input of the real Loyal Opposition, he will do essentially what Clinton did in his turns at the Presidential tiller, he'll take a more centrist tact. And mean it.

Superman is impossible for any mere mortal. President of the United States is probably a close second.