Keep It On The Billboards, Not In The Smoke-Filled Rooms

Billboarding is one of those lost arts we take for granted. They are often not just ads. They are commentaries, too, and meant to be such.

Their positioning is vital or the object of derision, depending on your outlook. There are a group of them, going north on I-41 right around Oshkosh, that represent a fascinating cultural dichotomy. They're on the other side of the freeway, but they can't be missed. The first group, as you get to it, are religiously-based, those Jesus-Is-Lord reminders. But they're followed, quite immediately and almost close enough to suggest that our minds are being toyed with, by another, equally-numbered grouping that announces a nearby strip joint.

Makes you wonder which ones were put up first. Makes you wonder, too, how to consider them: either to say that the first should blot out the second in your mind, you naughty boy; or, like most of us, to take care of the first on Sunday and, well, enjoy the rest of your week and by the way, there's fun to be had, feminism (and the rest of those awful but cavalier guys) be damned. We get to ask for forgiveness, but what's the use of that if there's nothing to forgive?

Whatever. But there are other, religiously suggestive but sometimes not, billboards that we see all over now. They, too, are reminders. They, too, have intentions deeper than those stated.

Those are the ones that tell you at what point in a fetus' development--never called a fetus, always a baby, itself a commentary that is to be considered beyond the billboard itself--its heart can beat, its hands can be seen, it can hear, etc., etc. The message pounds away at you--this is a human being very early on, far before it's ready to come out. How can anyone possibly end its existence?

Some of them directly invoke God's or Jesus' name, as if, again, Christianity were the only religion within which a discussion of abortion should be brief, pointed and already answered: NO. It isn't, but billboards don't have a lot of room, you know?

It suggests a deserved smothering, a flexing of power and control against that which every pregnant woman has upon discovery of her status, whether we like it or not, a power that has been exercised for centuries, legality also be damned. And to be sure, only Planned Parenthood billboards, as few of them as there are, represent something akin to an unstated pushback against them, actual family planning by plenty of other healthy means notwithstanding. At least I have never seen a billboard expressing, which it certainly could by utilization of the same First Amendment, the right of a woman to control her body under constitutional limitations (which there are, lest we forget), thank you very much. Have you?

By lack of exposure, then, a side of one of the most important arguments in our jurisprudence and culture goes mostly wanting. Liberals aren't lazy as often as they are insouciant and smarmy. The status quo doesn't need organizing; it's beyond that now because, you know, it's there. The discussion is over, true. We won. Nothing to fight for.

But ideas can die from a lack of expression, which forecasts their loss of salience. Once they figure out how dangerously under attack they are, though, advocates find that it's often too late. As it might be now, when the horrible new state laws passed in places like Georgia, Alabama, and Ohio are paraded in front of the Supreme Court that 45 has had a chance to significantly alter, what with two appointees out of nine that have already tipped the scales. Knowing this, those state legislatures, controlled of course by white, male Republicans who can't imagine the rights of a woman extending beyond the voting booth and actually into her individual self--and can't imagine, either, the possibility that, once re-established, restrictions on women's bodies won't be extended into men's reproductive rights, either; a specter that would loom large by retribution if for no other reason, but anti-perspective thick-headedness dominates cultishly paranoid behavior and squashes logic--have decided that, with possibilities of a possible impeachment and failure in the upcoming presidential election looming, now is the time to transcend that apocalypse and extend a far more preferred one upon the abortion rights advocates. Amen!

Messages that respond to these awful new laws scream for an airing. If your uncle rapes your niece, what are your plans to adopt? Stick that one up on I-75 out of Atlanta and see what happens. It's at least as outrageous as the religiously-afflicted one on I-40 east of Little Rock that suggests (shouts, actually) that it's okay to beat your kids because the Bible tells us so. There ought to be one that follows it by about 300 feet that says, Please ignore the billboard you've just read. Be good to your kids and they'll be good to you. Or maybe, in direct response: Jesus said to suffer the children unto him. Maybe you should, since it's clear you can't handle them.

I wouldn't mind that at all. Because that's where the conversation belongs. It belongs out there, not within law-making bodies. Nobody wins there, because that's the failure of power over influence.

Power is by nature coercive: Do this or else. It is dominating and it speaks to condescension and humiliation. Winners demand losers. But also revenge, so the relationship never ends and is never positive. Never. The losers wait in the tall grass as long as it takes. It is why, without the use of the actual force we had in the name of a highly questionable morality, we lost in Vietnam: the natives had all the advantages, especially time. Sixteen years wasn't enough: that's the amount of time etched on a wall in Washington, DC, listing the 58,000 Americans who learned that for us in the worst way, having their lives aborted just a little later, the reasons for which are, too, highly debatable. (No, I'm not suggesting that we should have dropped nuclear weapons on North Vietnam. But Ho Chi Minh understood the Western psyche: We get impatient and give up easily. To the Asian mind, 16 years is a finger-snap. In 1971, Henry Kissinger asked Chinese Foreign Minister Chou En-lai how he felt about the effects of the French Revolution. His response: It's too soon to tell. And now, a mere 44 years after a pointless war, we trade with Vietnam and exchange tourists. They're still a communist society.)

Influence, on the other hand, speaks to what is best in us. It is persuasive and requires one to stop and think. It is why a history teacher got far more mileage out of recommending books to be read and not requiring them to be 'covered' for tests, though there was always that: When you have to do something 'or else,' it's largely uncomfortable and not much fun. When someone you respect thinks something is a good idea, though, you might just look into it and benefit from it. A much better bond is created. That never ends, either.

Which one is preferable? Which one moves humanity in a better direction? Is there any choice?

I'm all for persuasive influence. If you think that God intended women to give birth regardless of circumstances as awful and devastating as they might be, and have the bucks to get it out there on a billboard and keep it there, then fine: We live in a society that allows that message, however misguided a use of religion I happen to think it is. But you'd better allow me to post a pointed response nearby, as sinful as you think I'm being. That, too, is my right and my advantage: to respond to your argument with one of mine, well-placed and well-timed.

And this argument will never, ever be solved. No law, no Supreme Court decision will determine that. The same pushback will take place because the two sides can never be completely reconciled other than to say that abortion is a tragedy and should be avoided--but sometimes can't be. That is our limitation as a human species, and no absolutism and the power than it can unleash, a stifling, horrible power that can't be put in an okay-just-for-this kind of box (because there are too many variables), will end the discussion.

It's going to happen. It can't be stopped. As a society, we are working on it, too: Teen pregnancies are down. But to pretend that it can be eradicated is whistling past a growing graveyard of panic-stricken women, short on health insurance or prohibited by it, who will resort to exactly the thing at which we cringe: coat-hangers.

So leave the discussion up on the billboards, not in the smoke-filled rooms. That's where it belongs and can flourish. It's one of the most important discussions we continue to have, so visual reminders of it can't hurt. Not like a coat-hanger, anyway.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark