Stuck at home, sick. I had a huge headache yesterday and last night when I went to bed, I felt it creeping into my throat. Probably strep, maybe swine flu. I'll find out tomorrow morning. But there's something else that bothers me more than this illness.
I've been having an ongoing e-battle with a longtime friend of mine who has adopted the conservative manner of not allowing for differences of opinion. It was probably inevitable that our disputes would eventually drift into the abortion debate. According to him, abortion equals murder, and there are no exceptions. My best arguments may have opened a small crack in his defenses, but when I confronted him with the idea that even he may have fathered an unwanted child in his younger days, and that it was possible that one of his partners could have had an abortion without telling him, he ended the 'conversation'.
Like most young men, he, too, was driven by lust for sex. I'm pretty sure that he got his fair share, at the least. After hearing him criticize 'all those people overseas' for engaging in unprotected sex, I turned the point on him and his youthful adventures. I didn't call him a hypocrite, I was willing to let him explain himself out of his logical predicament. He declared himself possessed of a clear heart because he was ignorant of anyone else's wrongdoing. I responded that he may not have helped end one of these so called lives, but he could very well have started one. The phrase 'so-called lives' prompted the end of our discussion.
I should have known. He was always full of passionate intensity and loved to argue. But we had a lot of fun in high school and since then, too. Ironically, he was the person who got me started into hunting, and hunting is the one activity that I have utilized successfully to help me come to terms with the concepts of death and dying (in my own life at least).
About a year after I started hunting, I lost one of my brothers in a tragic work accident. I was devastated. But it was hunting that taught me that death isn't necessarily tragic in and of itself. At first, I was void of all feeling. I noticed it when I shot and wounded a squirrel and went over to end its suffering. Up til then, watching an animal in the throes of death was difficult for me. Finishing them off filled me with many uncomfortable doubts. On this day, soon after my brother's death, I felt nothing at all. I was in an emotional coma.
But eventually, I began to see death as a necessary thing for the furtherance of life, as an integral part of life itself. One could easily say that death feeds the beginning of life just as easily as saying that life feeds the beginning of death. They are the two sides of the same coin. When done correctly, hunting actually teaches an appreciation for all living things.
Stalking an animal in his environment is not easy. One gains respect for the prey and begins to understand the cycle of life and death as a beautiful thing. A good hunter never kills indiscriminately, and never lets a wounded animal suffer needlessly. A good hunter incorporates the wiles of his prey into his own personality. (Call me a squirrel and I won't be offended.) It is the very essence of totemic worship- you are what you eat. People throughout history, primitive and otherwise, have taken animals as symbols of the characteristics they most wish to own for themselves. (American bald eagles, Russian Kodiak bears, etc.) The origins of these anthropomorphic feelings are found in the stories of hunters.
I truly hope that my friend does not end our friendship because of our disagreement over the abortion issue. I confessed that I should like to see abortion end altogether, but I don't think it can happen without extensive education and advances in birth control. Women find themselves in a desperate situation and deserve our assistance, not our condemnation. What I'm afraid of is that the conservatives who spend all day hunting down progressive liberals will never gain any respect for their prey and will never learn anything of value from us. They are trying to kill us indiscriminately. We're not as easily taken down as they would like to think.