Family-Cycle Planning
Next Thanksgiving, more babies might be around tables - whether they are wanted or not.
“I’ll be taking these Huggies and whatever cash you got.”
These are the words of Hi McDonough from the Coen Brothers’ classic film Raising Arizona.
Played by Nicholas Cage and co-starred with Holly Hunter, Hi’s wife, Ed, whose “ insides were like a rocky place where Hi’s seed could find no purchase,” meaning she couldn’t have babies, the movie hysterically shows us how Hi and Ed overcome the lack of fertility to become parents. Their solution is to steal a baby from an abrasive, local used car salesman, Nathan Arizona, whose wife had five of them: The Arizona quintuplets.
As many of us come together with families this year, the repercussions of the recent election will cast a shadow that will certainly dim rooms and likely leave loved ones staring awkwardly at each other. “They” won, but what will happen next, while it’s anyone’s guess, is regrettably, in many ways, entirely predictable. The nation will soon be dissected by Project 25. The laughable safety net in the United States will quickly resemble little more than some chewed-up mosquito netting.
The Founding Fathers of our nation, many of whom were atheists, decided that religious freedom was paramount to creating a new, more enlightened society. What they meant, however, was not that the American government should proselytize Christianity. They meant that American citizens should be free to worship whatever god they preferred. The First Amendment has an “Establishment Clause,” which forbids the government from establishing a national religion.
Donald Trump was supported by over 75 percent of Christian evangelicals. Trump regularly talks about how God spared him on that day in Butler, Pennsylvania. His re-election is now a mission from God. Ending abortion once and for all, and all of the other invasive things that right-wingers like to force on people, have become the ultimate wish list.
As the right hammers away at the Department of Education, diligently working to make American youth less intelligent and even dopey, classes that discuss family planning are being censored. The right has come up with another one of its genius terms that the average critically-thinking stunted American fails even to notice is actually bad for them. Family planning, which used to cover topics like contraception and abortion, is being renamed “Family-cycle planning.”
“Well, which is it, young fella?”
Family-cycle planning is not family planning. It’s baby-making. It’s teaching women to keep an eye on their cycles and for men to pull out. Given such “planning” is not very sound, it’s guaranteed to result in a lot more unwanted babies.
“Give Me That Baby, You Warthog From Hell!”
This is what “Ed” said when she was fighting to get her baby back from some guy who had been hired to find the kidnapped Arizona child. I am sure we will hear more often at next year’s Thanksgiving from tired, overwhelmed moms left with little or no help in Trump’s angry, Christian, everyone-out-for-himself America.
In the closing moments of Raising Arizona, after Hi and Ed have returned Nathan Jr. to the Arizonas and gone back home, Hi’s voiceover narration describes a dream he had. It’s a beautiful, poetic, unwieldy narrative about Nathan Jr. growing up to become a football star and enjoying Thanksgiving with his family thanks to a present from a mysterious couple (meaning from him and Ed).
Then, just when Hi is speculating about his and Ed’s own uncertain future, including a vision of the two of them as an elderly couple with their arms around each other, the whole thing falls apart. Hi begins to doubt himself once again, and it looks like at the end of Raising Arizona, he will just go back to the way it was before. He starts to question if he and Ed could ever have and raise a loving family and then wonders if it is Arizona at all: “Maybe it was Utah (10 Best Raising Arizona Quotes).”