I did it. If you put the nonsense symbols, €™, into my search function only three posts pop up – uh, four now including this one. I had to spend close to thirty hours laboriously removing them. How many I removed I can’t be sure. An off the cuff guess? There might have been an average of 8 of the nasty little bugs on each of the 900 some posts I attacked. That would be about 7,200 such abortions. I also got rid of a near equal number of similar nonsense symbols.
This is something I’ve been meaning to do for five or six years. A lot of early posts of mine, that reflect my thinking, were often unreadable. The posts I wrote about the thinking of a fellow named Russ Young ten years ago are one example. Mr. Young wrote confidently that folks like me would go to hell because we condoned the murder of tens of millions of innocents. The issue was abortion. At the time I was about to mount a campaign for Congress as an independent candidate and I wanted to pursue the implications of his thinking for potential voters to consider.
Those old posts had become particularly garbled because, in addition to €™, I had used an unusual font “verdana” that my wordsoft ap lost the ability to translate into readable English. What I had written was obscured by hundreds of digitalized ghosts that sprouted between my words like an epidemic of dandilions on a front lawn. Today, Mr. Young has a president in the oval office that reflects his thinking on abortion as Mr. Young expressed it a decade ago. That doesn’t mean that Mr. Young hasn’t changed his mind on the issue or decided that there are other important issues that undermine his support of President Trump. Today those posts are an historical artifact of 2006.
Even then, abortion had been politicized beyond comprehension. I never understood why, other than for politics, the national teacher’s union (the NEA) championed abortion rights. They certainly were’t speaking for all teachers. By the same token, I took a dim view of Nixon Era Republicans, who gave us Roe v Wade, suddenly joining forces with the Catholic church to appoint a pro-life Supreme Court. They were being every bit as spiritually hollow and political as the teacher’s unions.
There are silver linings. Just as the election of Trump has awakened a lot of moderates to action, the issue of abortion helped bridge a century of distrust and resentment between protestant and Catholic churches. There are still dark clouds as well. After making sure lots of fetuses made it to the delivery room the richest nation on Earth now has a massive epidemic of childhood poverty. I have never doubted where the blame should be placed for this sorry condition.
I became a “baby killer” within the Republican Party. I remember a little clutch of clean-living Christian kids snearing that at me as they walked by me at a GOP convention as I sat at a table in the hall bearing “pro-choice” leaflets. It wasn’t much of a leap from that designtion to being called worse than Mao, Stalin and Hitler by the Republican chairman of a House District convention I attended a few years later.
I still have a lot of old posts with other things that I’d like to clean up – I went a couple years without a working “spellcheck” on the blog. (I’m not sure its working now) Cleaning damaged old posts may open me to fresh criticism but it will also allow me to demonstrate that I am not a weather vane.
