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Educable Moments
By Dave Andrusko What timing, pun intended. This morning I was at the gym, watching the television screen as I walked on the Stairmaster, when a story about the gargantuan national debt flashed on the screen. I had never before seen the website www.usdebtclock.org. In case you haven't either, it shows you our national debt mount in real time.
Likewise, one of our Movement's preeminent objectives is to find ways to make the mass annihilation of unborn children vividly real, not just some bloodless abstraction. I wonder how it would affect people if during the course of their daily duties the number of babies killed in the last hour flashed in front of their eyes? How troubled would their consciences be? We've had success in making the unborn real-- in both a positive and negative sense. I needn't talk about the enormous power of ultrasounds, which make all the more difference because it's subtly life-affirming. And, of course, nothing has altered the contours of the landscape more than the lengthy battle over partial-birth abortions. That hand-to-hand combat was arguably the greatest educational campaign we've ever launched. And the visual representations was nothing high-tech, merely simple line drawings. But people reacted viscerally in a big, big way. And there are other ways of grapping the public's attention. One of them was on display earlier today. As you read in Part One, Nebraska has a new pro-life law-- the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act." As I wrote, Mary Spaulding Balch, NRLC's State Legislative Director, summarized the thrust of the law in just nine words: "You don't kill unborn children capable of feeling pain." Passage offers one of those classic educable moments, a chance to figuratively grab people gently by the labels and ask, "Do you approve of THIS?" Be sure to read Part One and pass it along to all your pro-life friends, family, and contacts. This is a big deal! Please send your thoughts and comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. |
The
program used it as an
illustration, as a way of making
an abstraction concrete.
Watching hundreds of thousands
of dollars of additional debt
added on in no time at all makes
the reality of a projected
yearly debt of between $1.3 and
$2.0 trillion (with a "t") more
real than I had ever imagined.