The March for Life should sport a clearly marked warning in bright, fluorescent colors: when you return home, your commitment to the pro-life cause will be tried, resisted, and fought.  The status quo is comfortable, routine, while talk of abortion is clearly too charged for polite conversation.  You will learn to let the bygones of 1973 rest quietly and gossip about the Grammys instead.

When a culture of life is our aim, this is precisely what cannot happen.

If we recognize abortion as the travesty of our age, we must be willing to feel uncomfortable, to stand for something real and true amidst a world of incessant accommodation.  It is unpopular, discouraged, yet altogether essential in shaking the apathy of our age.

Plato, too, foresaw this conflict when confronting ignorance in his Allegory of the Cave.  Having emerged from the cave of ignorance and seen the splendor of truth, Plato’s hero returns to spread enlightenment amid the world of shadow and blindness.  Yet those who remained in the cave reject his message of hope, preferring instead the comfort of immediate things.

They would laugh at him and say that he had gone up only to come back with his sight ruined; it was worth no one’s while even to attempt the ascent. If they could lay hands on the man who was trying to set them free and lead them up, they would kill him.

Society has become a large, cavernous cave.  Its passive citizens watch as shadows trace the walls, entertained by their familiar simplicity.  Yet a culture of life will only flourish in the light of truth, and it is our duty–our privilege–to make it known.

Be not afraid.