TFVNews: They Don't Have to Like Me

Question:

In talk.abortion, Damian J. Anderson wrote – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – http://www.sffaith.com/ed/articles/2001/1101rk.htm SAN FRANCISCO FAITH 1 November 2001 They Don’t Have to Like Me Martin Luther King Wasn’t Subtle, Either By Robert Kumpel At 6:15 a.m. in an industrial park near the center of Los Angeles County, a plain-looking warehouse is unlocked. Beyond the iron gates and surveillance camera, another iron gate leads to a truck yard, which leads to the giant doors. Inside, the trucks are warmed up. A few more people show up. Some are staff, some are volunteers, and two of them are off-duty police officers that will escort the trucks. The reason for all the security is apparent when you look at the trucks. Photographs of aborted fetuses are blown up to billboard size on each side of every truck bed. Over the photos is the word ‘choice’ in quotation marks and a web address. Some of the 8-10-week unborn babies are juxtaposed with a dime. Every working day, five days a week, since June, drivers of these trucks have plied the freeways of Los Angeles for three hours of morning traffic. The organizer plans to bring the trucks to the Bay Area the first two weeks in November.

[rest snipped] "I may not like what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it." However, I also have the right to say that this isn’t exactly the most intelligent of ad campaigns. — EAC code #191 121d:13h:03m actually running Linux. The Internet routes around censorship.

Response:

http://www.sffaith.com/ed/articles/2001/1101rk.htm SAN FRANCISCO FAITH 1 November 2001 They Don’t Have to Like Me Martin Luther King Wasn’t Subtle, Either By Robert Kumpel At 6:15 a.m. in an industrial park near the center of Los Angeles County, a plain-looking warehouse is unlocked. Beyond the iron gates and surveillance camera, another iron gate leads to a truck yard, which leads to the giant doors. Inside, the trucks are warmed up. A few more people show up. Some are staff, some are volunteers, and two of them are off-duty police officers that will escort the trucks. The reason for all the security is apparent when you look at the trucks. Photographs of aborted fetuses are blown up to billboard size on each side of every truck bed. Over the photos is the word ‘choice’ in quotation marks and a web address. Some of the 8-10-week unborn babies are juxtaposed with a dime. Every working day, five days a week, since June, drivers of these trucks have plied the freeways of Los Angeles for three hours of morning traffic. The organizer plans to bring the trucks to the Bay Area the first two weeks in November. A project planned for years, the trucks are the latest weapon used by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, a nonprofit pro-life group. Its founder and director, Greg Cunningham, briefs the crew before leaving on today’s run. On large map, he describes his plan for what freeways they will cover. Today is a loop that begins on the 605 North to 60 East to 57 North, to 210 West to 134 West, to 405 South to the 10 East to 5 South and back to 605 South. "We will drive this loop ad nauseum — that is, until every driver that has seen us is nauseated!" The session ends with a brief prayer. At 6:40, everyone boards the trucks. Everyone who rides wears a 50 pound bullet-proof SWAT vest with steel panels on all four sides of the torso. Each vest has pepper spray in its pocket. Helmets are located under the seats. Cunningham explains, "The California Highway Patrol turned down our application to armor-plate the cabs. Yet you can buy a bulletproof Mercedes or BMW just by placing the order. We are being victimized by content-based discrimination. That’s a case we could win in court if we ever get around to filing a lawsuit. The windows are not bulletproof, but they are coated with mylar film, which can stop a brick. Nobody is every going to pull us out of a truck and do to us what Reginald Denny had done to him by Damien Williams. We don’t put our people in harm’s way for the purpose of getting beaten up." As the trip begins, the police car follows the truck convoy, keeping lanes clear behind them and making sure no one can stalk the convoy upon return to the warehouse. The security car and the trucks are equipped with video cameras that document activity on each trip. Each member of the convoy communicates by radio. "Violence against pro-lifers is under-reported because a lot of pro-life activists just don’t think the police will do anything about it. And frequently they won’t do anything about it. It’s harder to get district attorneys to prosecute it and it’s harder to get judges to find people guilty for it or penalize them significantly. A judge is more likely to shrug off an assault against a pro-lifer, but a bogus allegation of an assault against a pro-abort is likely to land a pro-lifer in jail." During the early part of the trip, the trucks are going against the commute. Stalled traffic on the other side of Highway 60 cannot miss the message on each truck. The trucks move at 45 mph, the minimum legal speed on California’s highways. As he drives, Cunningham explains their mission. "The truck campaign is an outgrowth of the Genocide Awareness Project, which involves the display of large photo murals out of doors on large university campuses. We’ve now been on 33 public campuses all over the country, setting up the murals outside of student unions and what have you. Probably three quarters of a million students have seen these pictures now. That project was the result of a fairly sophisticated analysis we’ve done on the history of social reform, looking for the unchanging principles of social reform, going back 150 years or more. We’ve examined every movement from the abolition of child labor, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, etc. "Successful social reformers invariably used horrifying pictures to dramatize injustice. Those pictures were then used to confront the culture and prick the collective conscience. But since the reformers were social liberals, they found sympathetic allies in the press, who would publish and broadcast these photos. If we were to apply these principles to pro-life activism, we could only do so up to the point that we had to rely on the press. Clearly, the press, if not hostile, is certainly not sympathetic to our point of view. So we had to come up with a new mass medium, a way of putting these pictures into the heads of people who are never going to see them on television or in newspapers or magazines or billboards. It occurred to us that the freeway system is this multi-billion dollar complex designed and built for transportation, but could be appropriated for educational purposes. Commutes are getting longer and freeways are getting more crowded each year and you basically have a captive audience of people who can’t change the channel and can’t turn the page when they see us." Cunningham continued, "When I’ve done talk radio and I am asked a question, two or three words into my answers, everyone starts shouting me down. When I was on the Leslie Marshall show, she got so angry with me that she hung up on me. When I was on the Brian Whittaker show, I was supposed to come on at six in the evening, he kept me on hold until six-thirty, just beating the heck out of us, criticizing, misstating facts and taking hostile calls, not letting me off of hold into the conversation, so I finally hung up. Without realizing it, these talk show hosts who are so vehemently opposed to the truck project are making our point, which is, you can’t hang up on the trucks. You can’t put them on hold and you can’t shout them down. We’re not going to get a fair shake from most talk-show hosts, the conservative ones tend to not want to deal with this issue, but the trucks are in your face. It’s critical that they are in your face because another aspect of social reform that we identified was massive societal denial among people who had been complicity in injustice or who were complacent in response to the injustice, felt guilty about it, didn’t want to feel any more guilt, and, as a consequence, didn’t want to know more about the injustice than they already knew. So if you want to teach people who don’t want to learn, you’ve got to develop non-consensual methodologies that don’t rely on the consent of the person you are trying to educate in order to be effective. Once you look fleetingly at the pictures, they are in your head and you’re never going to get them out. Every time you hear the word ‘abortion’ thereafter, instead of calling to mind an abstraction, you are going to see a dead baby, tortured to death, bloody, sickening. Over time, if you have a functioning conscience, these images will begin to change the way you feel, think and ultimately, behave. The residual effect remains operative long after you’ve left the physical presence of the signs." At 54, Cunningham, has the background for any number of high-powered, high-paying careers. A former state legislator, justice department official and assistant U.S. attorney, something deeper keeps him doing this. "I sat in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles and every week watched 25 or 30 resumes come across my desk from people at very good law firms and people from very good law schools who graduated high in their class, edited their law reviews, all kinds of academic honors … day by day it became clearer to me that any one of these people could do my job at least as well as I was doing it and some of them better. But none of them would be willing to fight the greatest moral evil the world has ever seen. I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and explain what I was doing while the sewers of our cities were running red with the blood of our children." "We have the more convincing argument. Those who shout me down are foils for me because they are demonstrating their fear of my answer when they won’t let me give it. These trucks have created absolute pandemonium on the other side, because there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop this. If they respond violently, is just draws more attention to us and discredits them. If they take us to court, they just create a forum in which we can focus more attention on the project. It’s like the dilemma of an animal caught in a leg-hold trap. The harder you pull when you get trapped, the deeper the teeth sink into your leg and that’s exactly the dilemma being faced by the pro-aborts. They don’t know whether to ignore this or resist it, so the only semi-coherent criticism we hear, besides ‘You’re upsetting children’ is that the pictures aren’t real. The liberals know that if the pictures are real, they’re dead. There’s no moral defense for their position that’s in any way convincing, so they resort to the same tactics that neo-Nazi skinheads employ when confronted with evidence of the holocaust. They just say the pictures are fake and it never happened…. I’m not aiming this at the 20 percent of the population that is irremediably evil, but at the maybe 60 percent that’s just confused about all of this or believes abortion is the lesser of two evils because they don’t know how evil it actually is. The unwanted nature of the message is what Cunningham believes gives it power. "That creates a great deal of … read more »

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