Colorado’s Garden of the Gods
Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Like everyone, I am shocked and anguished by the shootings at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Although I haven’t spent more than a week of my life in Colorado, to me the attack felt personal.
I should say up front that I am a big fan of free or affordable health care. I know from choices made by my family and friends that preventative care can save us not only from aches, but from heartaches, and that choosing to neglect a nagging pain or discomfort can lead to diagnoses that are shocking to everyone except the person who concealed his ailment. For a society to add or event accept financial barriers to health care seems unscrupulous, and, in the long term, fiscally unwise.
Over the decades Planned Parenthood has stepped in to help many women and some men catch and treat a variety of ailments, often setting up clinics in neighborhoods that could benefit the most from additional medical and counseling personnel. Here’s how one of my university colleagues wrote about her experience on Facebook: “[Planned Parenthood] was there for me when I needed basic female care but could not afford it. If I had [had] cancer, thyroid disease, or any other illness, PP would have caught it through the important screening that they do. I was 27 before I had access to a health insurance plan. I too stand with PP.”
In the interest of full disclosure, I should quickly add that my wife (and hero) Kate worked for Planned Parenthood in Sacramento for many years. At her clinic she drew blood, gave test results, and counseled women on a variety of concerns and ailments, including treatments for cervical cancer. Later she came to coordinate the prenatal program at her clinic, counseling women on health, nutrition, and psychosocial topics, all in an effort to make sure that her patients gave birth to healthy babies. As someone who scheduled many Cesarean sections, she also ended up choosing the birthdays of many Sacramento babies, including some who are probably graduating from UC Davis this coming spring.
While Kate and her patients adored one another, there were also harrowing elements of working in a women’s health clinic. The view out her office window was partially obscured by a bullet hole. She and her colleagues regularly underwent precautionary trainings on suspicious packages and live shooters. Protesters have screamed awful things to her on the way to work, one of them nicknaming Kate “the baby-faced baby killer.” No abortions were performed in her particular clinic, but everyone there believed in and supported the right and freedom of a woman being able to make decisions about her own body. And in this way, they agreed with half of Americans (according to a May 2015 Gallup poll), and a majority of Californians.
People are free to disagree, and different political and faith traditions will ensure a variety of opinions on controversial topics of the day (immigration, the death penalty, gun control, as well as abortion). I am troubled, though, by the heated, inflammatory, and jingoistic rhetoric that we are hearing from some candidates for president, and I don’t just mean Donald Trump. Senator Lindsay Graham once said that as president he would unilaterally execute any American who he believes is “thinking about joining al-Qaeda or ISIL.” Due process? Speaking of the late racist from North Carolina, Ted Cruz once said, “We need a hundred more like Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate.” Perhaps most famously, at the September Republican debate Carly Fiorina made up grisly narratives that could not even be found in the creatively edited secret illegal surveillance videos created by the misleadingly titled “Center for Medical Progress.” One wonders if such rhetoric inspires or justifies in some a violent response.
I disagree politically with Ted Cruz, but of all the Republicans running for president, he was the first and for a while the only leading Republican who shared a message of concern about the Colorado clinic attack, in which one police officer and two Planned Parenthood clients were gunned down with an AK-47. Ted Cruz said, “Praying for the loved ones of those killed, those injured & first responders who bravely got the situation under control in Colorado Springs.” As I read this, I wondered for a moment if Cruz deserved admiration and respect on this matter. I remember thinking that maybe he is a maverick who is willing to break substantively with his fellow candidates, if a mere expression of empathy and prayer can be considered a significant risk.
And then this afternoon, CNN reported this: “When a reporter told [Ted] Cruz that the suspect in the Colorado Springs killings is alleged to have mentioned ‘baby parts’ after his arrest, the Texas senator responded, ‘Well, it’s also been reported that he was registered as an independent and a woman and transgendered leftist activist, if that’s what he is.’” The political stridency once again obscures humanity, to the disappointment of us all.
Add me to the long list of people who today mourn the deaths of Jennifer Markovsky, mother of two; Ke’Arre M. Stewart, an Iraq War veteran and father to one; and Garrett Swasey, the police officer who had once won a gold medal in ice dancing in the U.S. junior national championships. Swasey was the father of two young children. Let’s all consider what we can learn from their lives, and the way they ended.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on companies with female CEOs, berries of various sorts (two questions), The Beatles, people named Henry, furious anger, baseball stories, metric measurements, sugar, The Louvin Brothers, navigable rivers, communication technologies indicators, sequel extravaganzas, the ocelot of words, the man upstairs, spoof actors, wailer grannies, people who have forgotten rule #5 and will be reminded of it this evening, Nielsen, musical theatre, complex words that start with the letter D, active cautioning, prominent Native Americans, frequencies, people who we think of as Americans but who were actually born in foreign countries (such as Ted Cruz), Jesuits, newspaper headlines, and Shakespeare.
I hope you can join us this evening for the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Pop Culture – Music. “(I Get Knocked Down)” is the subtitle of Chumbawumba’s biggest hit back in 1997. What is the one-word T title of this song?
- Sports. What shooting guard had 53 points against the Pelicans on Halloween this year (2015)?
- Science. Using its Boeing CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, the company SpaceX has recently won a NASA contract to fly astronauts to what?
P.S. It’s Poetry Night this coming Thursday night at 8 at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Will you join us?