The Parable of the Oxbow

        Josh lives.  Josh walks.  Josh breathes.  Josh speaks. 

One day while teaching, Josh was asked, “What is the place of a new feminism in an age of newly constricted women’s reproductive rights?”

Josh spoke thus:

In a year of harsh winter, the hunger and the cold drove a kingdom to madness.

“Our children will starve,” the people wailed, “And we will starve with them.”

“We must slay the children,” the king decreed, “Or else our children will be the death of us.”

In the hunger and the cold, the king’s decree was wisdom.  The children were slain.

Now it happened in this kingdom that the king’s surveyors were careless, and the border badly mapped.  One child, by virtue of an oxbow that may or may not have been in the bordering kingdom, was not slain.

Believing all the children slain, the king was overjoyed.

“If the people will slay their children for me,” he reasoned, “What will they not do?”

The warm spring melted the madness from the heads of the people, but their hearts remained unthawed.  How could they love who had slain their very children for the hunger and the cold?

Frozen in a state of lovelessness, the kingdom withered, and its neighbor’s army, unopposed, deposed the king and seized the kingdom as their own.

“How can this be?” the newly deposed king despaired, “The people did nothing.  They sacrificed their children for hunger and for cold, yet they would not stand against an invading army.”

The mother of the one unslain child demanded of her husband that her family flee the kingdom.

“What do you fear?” her husband asked her, “The king that would have slain our child is deposed.”
“I fear the new king worst of all,” the wife replied.

“Are you afraid this new king will slay our child?” her husband asked her.

“He won’t slay our child,” the wife replied.

“What is it you fear, then, of the new king?” the husband asked her.

“I fear he will spare our child,” the wife replied.

“And how is that bad?” the husband asked her.

The wife replied, “One king’s sparing our child is a gift of fate.  A second king’s sparing our child is a debt.”