Last week, in the days leading up to President Obama’s visit, Library Mall played host to a group of traveling protesters known as The Genocide Awareness Project. With their colossal, sickening images of aborted fetuses, their stay was marked not so much by controversy (at least in my circles) as by umbrage, disgust and deep loathing. In this article I don’t want to address the message behind this display (that abortion is unethical). Instead I want to pick apart their shock tactic and elaborate my gut feelings of contempt for these people.
My reaction—and many of my friends’ reactions—was very visceral and very rudely rooted in the body. There were tears and vomit. I myself shook, grimaced and avoided Library Mall almost subconsciously for days. It’s not that these people were despicable human beings, that they were scum or that their sole agenda was to make as many students as upset as possible. We can give them the benefit of the doubt and presume they were sincere in their beliefs, beliefs to which they’re entitled.
I think most would agree that it’s not what they said (that abortion should be avoided) but how they said it (by shoving pictures in people’s faces and calling abortion genocide) that accounts for these physical reactions. If you can give me that much, give me this: they want to shock you and disgust you because they want to reach you. They want you to hear them.
Morgan Haefner wrote in a previous opinion column about what she termed the “State Street Societors.” That is, those well-meaning men and women who stand on State Street trying to talk to you about the environment, about homelessness, about war. She praised these folks as “the brave ones,” as “the opposite of selfish,” as fighters for the greater good in the face of all our disdain and apathy.
The Genocide Awareness Project people, with their grisly billboards, and the Wisconsin Environment people, with their clipboards, are similar in that they are both willing to tolerate our collective disdain. The critical difference is that the GAP will not tolerate our apathy. The Wisconsin Environment solicitors, convinced the environment is something that matters, try to reach you with a friendly face and talking points. It’s easy to brush them off. The GAP people bypass your reasoning and your brush-off by going straight for your gut.
If you cried or vomited, their tactic worked because they reached you. They didn’t persuade you, they didn’t please you, but they reached you. They think that abortion is revolting, vile and obscene, and for a minute they made your stomach curl too.
It’s a dangerous tactic because of its efficacy. It touches people, shatters people, in a way the Wisconsin Environment clipboard-wielders can’t or won’t. It’s dangerous because if every radical activist made you feel what they felt about their cause (the drones people, the anti-war people, the environment people, the animal testing people, the homelessness people, the prison-industrial system people, the nuclear proliferation people, the deforestation people), you would be reduced to a shaking lump of quivering flesh just by walking down State Street. If, picking up the newspaper, you empathized with every headline, you’d be a mess. Your heart would be ripped to shreds.
No doubt you know what it is to be made aware of something, something you find horrifying and egregious. Something to which people walking down the street are oblivious. You want them all to know what you know. You resent that they don’t feel the way you feel. You want them to feel it in their guts, to strike them dumb, to shake their souls. In short, you cannot convey the enormity of your awareness. And so, whatever your perspective on the Genocide Awareness Project, the Center for Bioethical Reform or abortion, I want you to appreciate what it takes to reach someone so viscerally.
Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
