Sophie’s Choice
By: Michaeljon Murphy
Vice Chairman
Constitution Party of Wisconsin
Soviet rocket by FrankvandenBurgh
Common Course folder
Back in the good old 80s, my liberal arts college had the brainstorm of developing a special required class between semesters to broaden the horizons of the hapless underclassmen. They called it “Carroll College Common Course.” Ominously, the course materials came in a massive three-ring binder. The first letters of each word in the class title were emblazoned vertically down the spine of the folder. The CCCC along the spine was nearly identical to the CCCP acrostic on the rockets of the Soviet space program and reminded me of their intercontinental missiles that threatened us during the Cold War. The students should have run to the nearest bomb shelter to wait for the “J-term” period to be over, but we blithely showed up to the lectures anyway.
Like Clockwork
One of the features of the course was some also required classic films designed to shape our values. After my soul ceased its retching, I still had no clue what lesson we were supposed to learn from A Clockwork Orange. Next up was Sophie’s Choice, the World-War II drama starring Meryl Streep. Sophie is an immigrant to America after suffering under the Nazis in Poland. She is a self-destructive alcoholic, unable to give or receive love. She finally reveals her deep, dark secret that caused her to be this way. On her way into Auschwitz, a sadistic German guard tells her to choose one of her two children to bring with her to the camp. She cannot have both, and if she does not choose, both will be taken away and killed. On the spur of the moment, she chooses her son, Jan, and agonizingly watches her daughter be led away. She cannot forgive herself for the decision. It will haunt her forever. It has ruined her life.
As a bewildered college student, this was hard to make sense of. There appeared to be no good choice and no good outcome. In hindsight, the movie was being used as part of a Marxist strategy by the highbrows of higher education to tear down their charges so they could rebuild on the ashes. First, they had to remove any silly, childish tendencies to believe in things like right and wrong, moral absolutes, transcendent good, and their ilk. Then, they could “build back better” on a foundation of moral relativism and secular philosophy. Thankfully, during my college years, I was part of a Christian college ministry, and my faith was growing by leaps and bounds even when the curriculum sought to shape me in quite a different manner. For the most part, they were unsuccessful, but it still left me with some things to unlearn as my Christian walk matured. Eventually, I would come to the answer to “Sophie’s choice.”
The Answer
The answer, for Sophie and for me, would be to not participate in their evil. In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, to “live not by lies.” She should have told him, “No. Let them both live.” By some miracle, the Nazi soldier may have been cowed into a moment of compassion by the rarity of a mother willing to call out evil. More than likely, both children would have been led off to death, as millions more were. However, Sophie may have found the pain to be more bearable because she did not play a part in the evil.
Healing from Trauma
Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Surprising to those who tout “rape and incest” as the “unsolvable” exceptions to abortion, when a woman seeks out an abortion to take away the specter of enduring a “rapist’s baby,” she finds that the emotional trauma only gets worse. Now she has participated in another violent act and finds she must struggle to take away the specter of her own guilt. She finds that she didn’t just get rid of a “rapist’s baby,” but a baby that was equally her own. Women who bring the child to term and raise him or her or make an adoption plan for the child can focus their efforts on healing from the crime against themselves, absent from the weight of their own sin. They find healing. Many find a close bond and a feeling of redemption in the baby they were once sure they would despise.
Choosing the lesser of two evils means you participate in the evil. You lower yourself to the evil you vote for. This is what I fear more than one of the two mainstream candidates being elected. The one with the R after his name may do some good while in office, but the half of the country that partnered with him in compromise on some major issues that should be showstoppers for a principled ballot caster will cause a realignment of society that “slouches towards Gomorrah.” Like the proverbial frog in the pot of slowly boiling water, they do not realize the change in temperature, because they are unsure of the proper moment to jump out of the pot with a straightforward, “no” to the chef.
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