The Assassination of Dr. George Tiller

There’s a scene in the movie Full Metal Jacket where a superior officer chastises a soldier for wearing a peace sign button on his army helmet. The soldier explains that he was making an ironic statement about the nature of war, but the superior office sees no room for irony on the frontline. For some reason, it’s just now occurring to me that all those years when I was volunteering at Planned Parenthood and NARAL, neither my fellow volunteers, the patients, nor the protestors could see that I had a baby tattoo on my right shoulder.

I’ve learned to be carful what I choose to write about and when. I abandoned my first attempt at a novel when I learned that the woman I based my main character on had been raped in a manner not unlike I hade invented in the book. The woman I chose to write my undergraduate thesis about died suddenly, just before my last semester of college and I had to mourn her and write about her simultaneously. Lately, there hasn’t been as much talk about the abortion issue and the so-called culture war, so I figured it would be a good time for me to explore those issues in my writing without being influenced by current events. I’ve spent large chunks of the last two semesters writing a story set in an abortion clinic. One of my classmates said that I’d have trouble getting it published since we now have a pro-choice president and there hasn’t been an attack at a clinic in some time. He said that the public appetite for stories about the abortion issue has waned.

I’m going to admit something very uncool. I try to remain blissfully ignorant of current events. As a writer and as a person, I’m not all that interested in now, since it’s almost impossible to know what “now” means. I don’t read the paper. I don’t watch the news. I listen to 8 hours of NPR a day, but that’s it and even some of that goes by the wayside now that I’m back in school. I almost never watch cable news. To the extent that I am interested in what’s happening at this very moment, I’m not interested in how a handful of rich, straight, white, middle-aged men spin it for their base, their network owners and their advertisers. I like to go to the source. After 9/11 I went to a mosque. After Hurricane Katrina, I went to New Orleans and the lower 9^th Ward. During the immigration debate, I went to the US/Mexico border. One thing that struck me about all the events is how different they look (and feel) from the ground than they do from my living room, sitting in front of the TV.

Monday night I went to the vigil for Dr. George Tiller, I was surrounded by people who mourned his loss and some who knew him personally. They talked about what a great dancer he was. They talked about how funny he was. I learned that he was the first abortion provider to put a chapel in his clinic and employ a Chaplin. They talked about him performing abortions free of charge for sexual assaults survivors who couldn’t afford to pay, some barely teenagers. They talked about the walls of his clinic being lined with thank you letters from his patients. Then, I watched Media Matters for America’s highlight reel of Bill O’Reilly’s attacks on Tiller, calling him “Tiller the Baby Killer” and accusing him of running a “Death Mill.”

It has taken the murder (assassination) of George Tiller to suck me back into the moronosphere of cable news and rightwing talk radio. I’m fucked up in the head behind this and I’m not sure why. The question of whether abortion is right or wrong doesn’t interest me a whole lot. As a man it’s a question I don’t think I can ever answer and as writer and thinker, it just doesn’t blow my skirt up. The question that does interest me is how we negotiate complicated issues in three distinct realms, the spiritual, the moral and the actual. The spiritual realm exists between every individual and their god, so the less said about it, the better. The moral realm is the abstract space between each of us and our fellow man. The actual realm is the concrete space between each of us and our fellow man. A moral debate over the war in Iraq can take place across a coffee table, a phone line or an internet connection. The actual realm is on the road to Fallujah or in a military recruiting office. It’s the decision to go or not to go; to pull a trigger or not pull a trigger. For me, there’s the abortion conversation that goes on in my head when I’m surrounded by the passionate, well meaning and occasionally (IMHO) misguided people like the ones at Dr. Tiller’s vigil and the one that goes on in my head when I’m surrounded by the passionate, well meaning and occasional (IMHO) misguided people I meet in churches and prayer groups. Then of course, there’s the whole other conversation that took place when I was volunteering at a clinic and walking a pregnant woman to the door. There was an entirely different conversation that went on in my head when, at 19, I got my girlfriend pregnant. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, I have a feeling there are no pacifists in foxholes either. I don’t know if that analogy makes sense, but it’s the best one I’m prepared to make at this time.

The tag line to the movie Oleanna is: Whatever side you take, you’re wrong. I do know that when I saw the people who knew Dr. Tiller personally, we were looking at this issue from very different realms. I’m still not totally comfortable picking a side, but I’m pretty sure which side would pick me.