Gosnell, The Movie

Never in all my years of sitting in a movie theatre until the last of the credits have long since rolled past have I EVER SEEN what I saw tonight after watching Gosnell:

Nobody moved.

The screen went grey, the running lights came on, the movie was way beyond oVER,

but there was dead silence; and nobody moved.

The audience was stunned.

OK, so there were only twelve + of us in there, but still. It was surreal.

When the group of three sitting one row down finally began to talk, it was in hushed Farsi. But none of the other groups said a word. And everyone just sat in their seats, unable to process what we'd just witnessed.

Finally, a group way down in front got up and turned around to see who else was in there, but still, not a word was spoken.

Everyone was speechless.

And after those ten had finally filed down the side steps, rounded the corner and disappeared out of view, after even more time paused, the dear friend beside me, whom I had sort of dragged in there after a long day of lunch and chatting, remained stunned.

Silence still reigned.

Go see this phenomenon.  And if you know writer/blogger Mollie Ziegler Hemingway or reporter J.D. Mullane, give them my heartfelt regards. They are the real show stopper stars of this story.

Kudos to blogger/reporters everywhere, even if the one in the movie was just a composite:

The Rest Of The Story

PS:
You know that tense shaking that your body sustains when you're watching the perfect horror movie, a Braveheart treachery scene or Jaws? It's a combination of The Chills and a shot of adrenaline?

I got that 2/3rds of the way through. And it was just a freaking courtroom scene. How did they do that? oMy, but the art of editing and sound design can so powerfully affect the brain.

PPS:
Good to know (thank you blogosphere) to boycott GoFundMe and THANK Indiegogo with all future fundraising needs.

Alternate Realities?

BabyAmZyg's editor here:

Yes, with all my heart, women and men create alternate realities when depressed, suffering from post traumatic stress, when taking weird meds, or when... when ANYTHING unwelcome threatens to take them down.

Our brains are so gifted with a suppleness and strange facility to be easily mislead.

This capacity is called Original Sin. We all have it, we all strive to elude it, and we all suffer from our failure to avoid the effects --the fall out-- from that eluding.

I make this confident assertion from three personal exhibitions of the phenomenon.   Three times (that I know of!) when I concocted an alternate reality and swore on stacks of Bibles that my memory was correct when it turned out (in at least two of the three times, anyway) that I was very WRONG.

Incident #1
Following a 12 month period of slogging through more stress than most weakling humans like me could stand...

(...failed to meet a college graduation deadline, laid off from work, moved twice to save on rent, embarrassing CRISIS pregnancy, shotgun wedding and the surrendering of 95% of its planning to an insensitive mother in law, learned that our pre-marital assessment indicated we are extremely incompatible, took a very stupid and costly honeymoon, scoured the classifieds for a last minute address to set up shop as "Christian Parents," scoured the Classifieds for employers that would hire a woman five months pregnant, had the baby without insurance, struggled to parent an infant and try NOT to parent my spouse while working part time in compressed short order with no parents around while living on a $60/week for an 'everything' budget, and then getting dissed by the hick pastor of our church for being "such a sinner"...)

... my parents stopped in for a night and a day, passing thru town.  They were very grateful for our convenient digs, and were excited that we could put them up.  Saying goodnight before turning in, they brought up a detail from some long ago previous season of life, and I responded with some recollections. They denied my recollections. I stood firm, and insisted my memory was correct and they were wrong. I just knew they were wrong!  After they both denied my account of things, we had to agree to disagree, though I was really peeved and feeling incredibly betrayed at their inability to recall my account of things.  I still believe I was right, but given all the stress we'd just (barely) survived, I think I can say the parents were more likely correct and I was a nut case.

Incident #2
I returned to a Jack In The Box one day after dining there with the kids. I was sure I'd left my wallet full of the month's operating cash ($350- things had gotten a little better) on the fast food counter. They were so polite and sensitive; SUPER helpful, allowing me to look at security camera footage in the manager's office to see where it went. Wouldn't you know, the 30 minute period in question (when my receipt indicated the exact time of our visit) was mysteriously missing. I smelled a rat. A major conspiracy. I had been wronged, I just knew it!  I was insane with indignation.

I even went back the NEXT day to have a word with a different manager.  Still no tape, and no wallet. NO satisfaction. No grocery money. What else was there to do but return home and go to my knees to pray.

That's where all the answers effectively come from, in my experience, so I shut the door of my bedroom, fell to the floor and really sobbed kneeling there against the bed.

And what do you know. I felt a strange compulsion to look under the bed... Some would say that was the Holy Spirit, but I am of a mind it was probably just a subconscious flicker of sanity.

There under the bed was the wallet.  I could BARELY recall placing it there a week prior, feeling sure that it would be safer there than in my purse where I'd be apt to spend it all too quickly.  I had created an alternate reality out of some primeval stress over having too much cash in my impulsive little mitts.

"...Created an alternate reality."

You see why Christine Blasey Ford may not be a reliable witness?  I've done it, and she has even more reason than I did to invent a memory.  I was carrying on in a state of anxiety over cash and marital crises: she was carrying on after six or so years working for the manufacturer of Mifepristone, one of two drugs used in the abortion pill 'cocktail'.

Her psyche is intricately linked to a need to keep abortion legal for her own sanity's sake.  

Why wouldn't she imagine a Supreme Court nominee is himself The Devil Incarnate when, if approved, he could very well be the deciding vote criminalizing her livelihood?

Even if it were true that she imagined this fiction years before his nomination, knowing, as she must have, that he was living the prosaic life of a supposed self-righteous pro-life Catholic judge might've been enough to send her imagination into full tilt.

If working to secure FDA approval for a death pill doesn't send your psyche beneath some primeval netherworld bus, nothing would. And I believe hers is there, begging for rescue. (I also believe her abortion minded cohorts could have her convinced that sheer boldface lying isn't really lying if it's done in the service to a woman's right "to choose" (<-- and here is where every right thinking human inserts the rest of the matter: "woman's right to choose... to kill her unborn child.")


Incident #3
It's two weeks ago. I realize the keys in my purse are not mine; they are my husband's set, and I must've left my set of keys back at his parent's house.  Come to think of it, I can see them "in my mind's eye," right on the dresser of his mother's guest room where'd I'd just spent the afternoon sorting through a box of old family photos.

We call her to see if she and Gramps have found them. No, they haven't.

We call the church where we'd been that evening. Security says no; no sets of keys have been turned in to Lost and Found.

We're stumped.  I can see them, plain as day, sitting next to my neck wrap on that dresser back at my in-law's.  It's crazy that they haven't been found in the spot where I am sure I left them.

So... husband to the rescue. He knows this drill: down to our knees we go, he urges.  We bend down alongside that trusty old bed of ours, patellas settled comfortably into well worn his-and-hers prayer pillows; home made kneelers of a sort.

(So I'm not an expert seamstress. If they work, they work!
And they really do work)

Once he's implored the God of Order, who banishes chaos and brings light out of darkness, to give aid to his poor wife's brain so that she can recall where she put those keys, he gets up and begins to look around the house (again), and finds himself searching apron pockets.  Why? Who knows why, it just seemed like the right thing to do.  And, low and behold, there they were, in the big pouch pocket of a gardening apron that was dangling from the curtain rod over the backyard door.

And how did I imagine they were back at my mother and father-in-law's home, over an hour away?

W E L L,   we   just   don't   know,

BUT, 

I had done it again: created an alternate reality for no apparent reason.

The mysteries of these forays into semi-sanity are little understood, and yet I've a feeling one will probably strike again...

Should I be so unfortunate as to be taken in by yet another self-imposed fiction, at least I am certain as to how one extricates herself from its power:

PrayPraY PRAY away the chaos of the mind 

and learn to depend on the Power of the OnlyOmnicientOtherWhoKnowsUs 

in order to get a firm fix on what is TRUE and right and good.

And I will pray too for sex abuse victims, men and women everywhere, who have nowhere else to turn but their frayed psyches, frayed PhD's, boxes of donuts and anyone who will listen. May they learn to crave the abiding leadership of the only One Who Does Not Lie.  Because every human lies. And they often don't even know they're doing it.

Craving Truth right now in the name of Christ Jesus The ONLY; the ONE who is coming again soon. And when He does that, everyone will know it's Him doing it.

AMEN.

PS: just ran across photos of me standing in a line of bridesmaids, all of us matching in flouncy bouncy "eighties" dresses, and have NO RECOLLECTION of this event.  I am sure having to wear that dress occasioned the need to banish the memory from every part of my brain.

Once again,

the human memory is a famously, 

hugely 

unreliable thing.