05 May 2012
I call this piece "Discarded" because most of the wood and stainless steel I used to create it was in the scrap bin. The slice of a berry tree crotch that supports the sculpture on a pointed stainless steel rod looks like the chinese character for person or people (人 ren). The curved pieces of various woods, having the shape of a bent over person and different inherent colors were chosen to represent different people groups that live in America. The figure at the top of the sculpture represents human unborn babies. It is made of a discarded cedar 2 x 4 found in the trash. In our own US constitution prior to 1865 in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 it stated that "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons" meaning the non-free slaves. In addition to the Indians, Africans and other who were considered to be sub-human (3/5 of a human), Italians were not allowed to own property in some eastern states, Irish were discriminated against and if you were of German descent you could not live within 125 miles of Washington D.C. in the years around WWI and most German books were burnt in public burnings. American and foreign born Japanese were locked in camps during WWII in California and women could not vote until the early 1900's. We have a history of considering various people groups sub-human and we discarded them. But now we live in as enlightened time when we have reconciled these sub-human categorizations of our fellow citizens with the exception today of the unborn. Now in the 21st Century we consider the unborn regardless of development age to be sub-human. So as we did before we discard the unborn people group for our convenience. Like the American Indians and blacks and women, the unborn are an inconvenience to us and can be easily discarded and forgotten. Over one million babies are aborted in the US each year. Next will be the mentally ill and retarded, the lame, those with genetic defects, and the aged. The Bible has a harsh promise for those who mistreat our babies and children as stated in
Luke 17:2 “It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble".
