I keep hearing the sentence in my head, “I never promised you
a rose garden.”
Life isn't meant to be a rose garden. It's meant to be whatever
we make it, and what we’ve created for the poor in America is largely a
garden of misery. Especially a poor
woman who wants an abortion.
I've always seen the abortion question as more about money
than religion. It’s about both, of course. Religious people of a certain stripe
like to think they’re doing God’s work when they act on their belief that preventing
you from deciding you’re not ready to have a baby is what God wants them to do,
individual rights be damned. That’s religion. But in practice abortion is
available to anyone with money. It’s only poor women, women who can’t travel
because their kids won’t eat if they take time off work, women who can’t afford
a hotel room and enough gas in their tank to drive to the next state, women who
don’t have the family support to get through the arduous process of an abortion
who will suffer. That’s one of America’s most distinguishing features: fucking
the poor.
And that’s what we’re about to go back to. “Conservative”
means, among other things, slowing down the progress of change, going back to
the way things were. The good old days, when men decided things and their
little women deferred, demurred, capitulated. Subjected themselves to their
will.
The black cloud, for those concerned with individual rights
in this country, is the likely overturn of Roe v. Wade. It has been a
generation coming, but we’re apparently here, thanks first to McConnell, and
now Trump – and, of course, the American populace that put the reins of power
into the hands of these two men.
We like to talk about ourselves as a democracy, a society
governed by majority rule, subject to the wise supervision of a judiciary that
assures we never lose sight of basic rights for all, never allow a tyranny of
the majority, but we’re not that. We have this thing called the Electoral
College, which allows a minority to determine who becomes president, and we
allow individuals who play the system the ultimate say in how we are to be
controlled. It’s not a government of the people, by the people, for the people;
it’s anything but. It has shaken down to a government of the people by the
evangelicals and their ilk for the 1%.
Over the years, the original notion that the balance of
power should be centered on the legislative branch of government has shifted
gradually toward an ever stronger executive to the point where we now sit and
watch, hands tied by laws of our own making, the daily outrage of cruelty of a
self-serving narcissist. And because we allowed him to take over the controls,
he’s about to tie up the judiciary for the next generation, and there is, for
all the noise and banging about, not a damn thing we can do about it.
Much as I’d like to think we shouldn’t screw the poor when
it comes to abortion, my chief concern is the packing of the court with men
working under the assumption that wealth is its own justification, that in
practical terms the curiously American notion that you can spot God’s approval
when you come across a wealthy man can serve as a guiding light in forming our
institutions. “Conservative” here means going back to the days when you could
pretend that the justice was blind, that the law against sleeping under a
bridge applied to rich and poor equally. Conservative means destroying the last
of the labor unions, removing the strictures of government oversight, putting
all our faith in laissez-faire capitalism, making the generation of wealth the goal
at the cost of a fair distribution of wealth. That’s what’s almost certain to
come down the pike with the appointment of conservative judges.
I’ll admit I’m looking at the news as an outsider here. I
have no background in politics, know precious little about economics. I admit
that, as much as I try to read broadly, I am as limited to the particular news
sources that tell me what I want to think is true as anybody these days. But
that’s how I see what appears to be happening.
“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” someone
asked Benjamin Franklin at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
“A Republic, if you can keep it,” he is said to have responded.
“A Republic, if you can keep it,” he is said to have responded.
We define republic as a representative
democracy. A form of government without
a monarch, with separation of powers and regular elections, but above all a
representative democracy. Democracy doesn’t describe what actually happens in
government; it describes a dream, something to strive toward. We have given
that up now, handed the country over to special interests, to the rich and the
well-connected and those who will do their bidding. Think Citizens United
was a bad decision? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
I’m nearly eighty. I have lived through some wonderful
progress toward that dream in my lifetime. I saw up close the end to
segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, those heady days of the march from
Selma to Montgomery. I saw women gain the right to control their own bodies in
Roe v. Wade. I saw the stigma removed from gay people and their right to marry
guaranteed. I was born under Roosevelt and saw in the New Deal how a fair
distribution of wealth lifted domestic boats. I saw in the Marshal Plan how
America could combine self-interest with a helping hand to former enemies and
use policy to lift boats internationally. I saw America, born in slavery and genocide,
could nonetheless set a trend toward greater individual freedom for all. For
the time I have left, I expect I will have to live in an America that no longer
represents that striving. I hope it’s only a misstep, that in time the next
generation will take back the dream and bring it to life again. But for now -
and probably for the (for me) foreseeable future, that is apparently not to be.
Getting out the vote isn’t everything. But it would have
prevented this disaster. And it is the only thing I can see that might set
things in the right direction again.
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