The Fourth proposed virtue of the Next Democracy, “Respect and Reverence for all Life and the Living“,  sadly brings us to the  divisions in this country over health care and environment.  For women, the divisions regarding life and the living are so very vulnerable to misunderstanding because of the semantics of this whole struggle.  The semantic gulf somehow tragically makes it look like one side cares for the born and bearing and the other side for the unborn. Perhaps once again we have taken a nuanced spectrum of human issues, packaged the concerns into overly simple, misleading contrarian political memes and tried to resolve them through the law. Humanity, particularly in a democracy, has an amazing capacity to resist the law when it reaches too deeply into bodies and psychs of people. Health care and its practitioners must be free to deal with individual patients in both personal morality and the body’s biology with its relentless science of inevitability.  As for legislating morality, anyone here remember the raging success of the prohibition laws of the early 20th century or the ‘war on drugs’?   

Life is both good and for many sacred. The reverence for life reaches beyond the human drama into the rain forest, the plastic choked oceans, and the melting tundra.  Choice is a weak word. Choice is what you have when you select your chewing gum at the store. This Project proposes ‘decision’ as the working word for the prolonging or curtailing of life on earth in all of its expressions. Beyond the locked in debate of this day, people tend to be Pro-Decision providing a genuine decision is what is on offer and we are not presenting a ‘Sophie’s Choice’.   The word decision makes sense only as long as one remembers decisions in the matters of personal health care originate and orient themselves in the individual’s mind and soul first and not in the court of law.

The Good Decision asks the Next Democracy to allow us to take into full account the individual, community and the public aspiration. The current administration seems to be trying to solve the conflicting issues by vaguely supporting life in the womb while disdainfully allowing the planet, species, and ‘collateral’ people to suffer, endure risk, and lose life. The fourth virtue of the proposed Next Democracy says no to that kind of disingenuous, indifferent split position. Good is deep consideration of both life and the living, including planet earth, which is the only available living support system for all of life on earth . . . no matter what you think, believe, or how you vote.