By Dave Andrusko
It is, almost literally, the eleventh hour. While an unprecedented number of Americans have already cast their ballots for pro-life Donald Trump or pro-abortion Hillary Clinton, many more will make that fateful decision tomorrow.
What could be said that hasn’t already been said—and often?
Let me offer this which may sound trite but is just the opposite: more is caught than taught. We can tell our children or our friends or our colleagues about the importance of voting, but we don’t take the time to trudge over to the school or firehouse, what message have we sent? The power of example is hard to exaggerate.
Likewise, you and I can talk until we are blue in the face about how abortion takes the life of an unborn child and so often emotionally maims the child’s mother. When someone who is genuinely undecided whom to vote for reflects on how so many of us have helped a pregnant teen to survive the pressures to abortion, they will tell themselves that is someone whose opinion is worth great consideration.
In the middle of a genuinely historic campaign season, this may seem like a small thing. Amidst all of the political stuff we’ve done, in the last month Lisa and I have walked on behalf of two women-helping centers to help raise money. One of my children volunteers at one of them. Two others walked with us. My son and his wife are fully aware and fully supportive.
Pro-lifers, media myths to the contrary notwithstanding, are a varied lot. What we share in common, with every corpuscle in our bodies, is the unalterable conclusion that each and every life matters. This as much as anything else, I believe, separates those who sit by and those who are driven to try to stop the killing.
The Soviet madman Joseph Stalin is “credited” with the dripped-in-nihilism observation that “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” The point?
That barbarism on a small scale is like a stake through our heart. But a slaughter on the scale that claims millions of lives is so overwhelming, our minds cannot process the horror.
Honest to goodness, I had never seen “Judgment at Nuremberg” until I stumbled across it on AMC. Let me be clear: I am not comparing abortion to the Holocaust; that is a comparison that gets us nowhere.
What I am comparing is our collective response to the deaths of over 59 million unborn babies to an unforgettably powerful back-and-forth where two of the men on trial confront the declaration that the Nazis killed “millions of people.”
One defendant scoffed: how could it be, he says dismissively. “How could it be possible? Tell them, how could it be possible?” Another defendant, in a matter-of fact-tone, calmly explains, like a good engineer, that you can kill 10,000 people in a half-hour at one site.
“It’s not the killing that’s the problem,” he says, as if pondering the moral equivalent of how many sheep can be shorn of wool in 30 minutes, “it’s disposing of the bodies. That’s the problem.”
E-v-e-r-y l-i-f-e matters. Each and every one of those 59 million babies suffered a fate that was mind-numbingly brutal, soul-chillingly cruel, and morally indefensible.
Any president who is blind to these truths does not deserve your vote, or anyone else’s.