"Monday!" he said.
"Great!," I thought, "right after the first snow." "Fine!", I said. "Send along some extra shear pins!"
I cannot make the changeover myself, this year. It is a nasty job. The parts are heavy, and have to be brutalized into place. Half of the work is done while lying on the floor. And I have my own changeover to deal with: my hip replacement is less than a month old.
The physical consequences of taking out a natural-born hip joint and substituting metal and plastic parts is damnably irritating, but nothing special. The psychological effects are much more interesting. My natural-born parts are wearing out. Whatever it was my unwitting mother gave birth to is starting to grind down.
In the State of Mississippi, voters rejected a proposal to define a fertilized human egg as a person. It was a stupid proposition, in the first place. Logically, it would have been something like defining an acorn as an oak tree, or a daisy seed as a wildflower garden. Legally, it would have been chaotic. A zygote--a one-celled organism, might seem to be able to claim inheritance rights to the farm. Politically, it was just a way for fundamentalist, religious zealots to tighten their grip on crotch politics, and completely control what a woman can do with her own body, even when her life might be at stake.
A zygote, a fertilized egg obviously is alive: it isn't a rock! And it obviously is something human: it isn't a Canada goose. But it isn't a person, either.
It takes a long time to become a genuine person. It is a process. Half of the information that it takes to develop a person is in the male-produced sperm, and half is in the mother's egg. That single-cell divides, and divides again, producing a pocket of undifferentiated cells; copies of the zygote. Sometimes those pockets of cells divide, and identical twins are born. Sometimes they re-combine to a single mass. That isn't a person dividing, and recombining. It is undifferentiated cells.
It does not always go well. About half of the time, the body rejects what is happening. That isn't the birth and death of persons: it is just a recognition of something that has gone wrong. Attached to the uterine wall, we call it an embryo, and sometimes the body rejects it there, too; perhaps about one time in six, or so. It takes luck, on the way to becoming a person.
After a couple of months, or a little more, suggestions of human body parts become evident, and we call it a fetus. Finally, after about nine months, if God is willing' and the crick don't rise", a baby is born. Even the baby is unfinished. The brain, especially, has a lot of work to do before it begins to work like a person. Most of us cannot remember anything, or much of anything, before about the age of four years. There is a good reason: the brain is working hard to shape itself into what makes us persons.
That is to say, there is no simple, single point at which we become human persons. It is a process. It is impossible to point to any moment, and say, "There! Now we have a person!"
I am confortable, finally, in saying that I am a person, although I would be reluctant to let Mississippi voters put it on the ballot. To be honest, I am missing a couple of parts--my duodenum, for instance. It had something to do with a stomach ulcer operation. And now I do have a couple of titanium parts, and a little plastic, I guess. But I am still a person! I am!
I suppose that someday I might have to replace a few more parts with plastic, or maybe with micro-processors. I already have a plastic eye lens! I forgot that. No matter! Knees, someday? Who knows? I sawed off a couple of fingers, but the doctor put them back. They are as good as new, but stiff, like clothes pins.
This is what I have been worrying about: how many parts do they have to replace before I am not a person, anymore, but a thing; a thing that can walk and tell stories and recite my own poetry, and remember what I used to think before I got a quad-core processor to replace my brain?
At what point, because of which particular replacement part, because of the loss of which particular specific original part will I no longer be a person?
"No!", they will say. "He is made of 51% non-human parts, and even some of his human parts have been borrowed from some other person."
So I am campaigning for a federal law written by people who do not drink tea, to identify precisely at what point, or because of which specific replacement part, I will no longer be a person.
How much silicone is too much silicon?
We need clear, simple answers to these wrong-headed questions!
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