#anonymous sub

Steven Universe angst, not something I ever expected to find in my submission box. But I liked reading this, and I wanted to draw something from it. The end result isn’t what I saw in my head, nor is it really neat. It is a messy colored sketch. Regardless, thank you for this. I love reading and this was, although sad, fun to read.

sub make_iterator {       my @items = @_;       my $count = 0;

      return sub {  # returning an anon-sub                         return if $count == @items;                         return $items[ $count++ ];                      }

}

my $cousins = make_iterator( qw/111 222 333 444 555 666 777/ );

say $cousins->() for 1 .. 5;

OUTPUT: 111 222 333 444 555

Now adding another iteration:  

my $aunts = make_iterator( qw/aaa bbb ccc ddd eee fff/ );

say $cousins->(); say $aunts->();

I think for some of them it acts as a counter-weight for sins even. If you found out that someone that saved thousands of Jews had committed adultery, would you not still consider them on the whole to have been a just person? But what if instead of thousands, someone managed to help save millions of “lives” by passing a law requiring a 12 year old to give birth to her father’s child? Wouldn’t all your other sins be simply drowned out.

I’m saying this by the way as a former “pro-lifer” that legitimately had those thoughts. I read the pamphlets went to the talks and even almost protested a clinic.  I ended up abandoning those views when I 1) studied the philosophy of personhood and realized the incoherence of the “pro-life” position (who says philosophy never applies to real life?) but more importantly 2) found out a friend of mine was going to get an abortion and the circumstances as to why she was getting one. I was simply unable to hold onto a pretense of religious fundamentalism when I saw that the I could dispense compassion to either a person I knew and cared about and who I knew had hopes, feelings and felt loneliness and despair or a mound of human DNA which is sometimes capable of exhibiting primitive behavioral states in a sufficiently advanced form but nonetheless was declared a full and whole person by Holy Writ. Most people who consider the latter a person would not do so had they not been told by the theologians who claim divine knowledge. If I was supposed to provide compassion to only one, I only saw one option. Ethics is about real people, not theological constructs.

 People that call themselves “pro-life” (as I did) are not monsters scheming to restrict freedom, they sincerely see themselves as life-savers. But their basis for believing that they are saving lives is ill-founded and has had disastrous consequences with little to nothing good to show for it.