Ghosts are real, and I found one yesterday in the form of an "In Transit" sticker.
The sticker was attached to a deep blue 1998 Pontiac Grand
Prix (I know, because I have the same model in a different color). At the wheel of the parked car was a girl, no older than 17, on a cell phone. Even with a fairly heavy tint on the windows, it was clear she was crying.
When you're sitting in a parking stall outside a health clinic like the one I'm on the board of, tears staining your cheeks, one of two things is happening - you're either crying because you just got a positive pregnancy test, or you've tested positive for a disease. In my 9 months on the board of the Central Health Center, a clinic that provides low cost health services to women including pregnancy and STD testing, I've seen young women and men sitting in the parking lot, some talking, some obviously waiting for their friends or lovers to come out with condoms or test results. I'd like to say you can see the anticipation on their faces, but you can't. Often times, they're a blank slate.
Which is why I'm haunted, because this young woman's life had obviously just changed dramatically. I'd put money I don't have on the idea that a trip to the hospital, scowling parents in tow, is no more than 9 1/2 months away for her. Afterwards, whether it's a disease or a child, things will be different. You could almost hear the doors closing on her future.
Which is one of the big reasons I tell people politics matter. For a lot of
people, politics are a theoretical thing - something to follow like a game, track like a horse race or avoid like the plague. It's so easy to hear statistics - a trillion dollars, three million e-mails, 4,000 dead - and write it off as something either out of your control or existing in some theoretical world you cannot penetrate even if you were concerned. It's easy to pass off or get caught up in the wrong thing. It's criminally easy to forget the human impact when considering politics.
For the past 7 years, this country has insulted its parents and robbed its children of sex education, opting instead for the entirely ineffective and religiously flavored
abstinence only approach. The only way, our kids are told, to avoid pregnancy and disease is to avoid sex all together, something less than 30 percent of graduating high school seniors do. If you subtract those in the AV club who don't abstain by choice, the number gets even smaller. Nothing is going to stop one of the strongest urges the human brain produces from taking place among a population that can be irresponsible and impulsive. It's like throwing a war and expecting companies not to cash in.
We cut funding for clinics and nonprofits who care to address the problem. More over, we shun them from the community and make them feel "dirty" for caring enough about our kids to talk to them, frankly and truthfully about a difficult issue.
Any education that ignores the basic facts that high school students are very likely to have sex, and then throws bad information at them about contraception is like training soldiers how to avoid bullets instead of how to fire a gun.
STDs are exaggerated, condom use is discouraged or ignored, which is basically the same thing, and our children graduate high school with more than 40 percent, according to recent statistics, believing you cannot get pregnant the first time you have sex. That's not the most
embarrassing stat - that would be one in four, ONE, IN FOUR, girls graduates high school with an STD. That is goddamned unconscionable. And, there's a human toll that's easy to gloss over.
There are thousands of girls in cars, crying their souls out, wishing they'd made a different choice, wishing they'd used a condom, wishing they'd never met the boy who, hours earlier, they would have bled and died for (as is they way with teenage hormones). Mothers, terrified of the lives growing inside, them - disease growing on young organs that will never go away - confusion about what information is real from the government sponsored programs - it's all very real.
But it's the In Transit stickers that haunt me. This girl, crying to someone on a phone in a dark blue Grand
Prix in the parking lot of a health clinic that cares enough to offer services, she had just gotten that car. I imagine her squealing with delight when the dealer or her father or mother handed her the keys. I imagine her first ride in that car, just a few days or weeks ago, the joy and freedom she must have felt. The roads were her playground and the world was her oyster and now that front seat is the site of a moment that is taking her life in a direction she didn't want it to go. A direction that could have been prevented if information had flown more freely, or if questions without fear of losing funding. A direction that she cannot change. My heart bleeds for her and the fact that it was done in my name, with my money, chips away at my soul.
Kids need information, not barriers to information. They need guidance, not black and white answers to multi-hued questions. They need access, not roadblocks.
We should be ashamed of ourselves for electing people who do this. I am ashamed.
And haunted.
