July 5, 2022 (Day 854)
America is worth fighting for.
I am fresh off the 4th of July fireworks display in Provincetown harbor so I readily admit that I may still be a little bit drunk on (or maybe hungover from) patriotic nostalgia. It is almost impossible to sit on the cool grass or the damp chilly sand on a perfect summer evening and watch all that gunpowder detonate across the sky in glorious blinding colors and to feel each thunderous boom of every explosion throughout your entire body and not believe that what we have deserves some effort to preserve it.
This national birthday was a rough one. Many couldn’t find a reason to celebrate at all. We are seeing the small and terrified among us start to pull down the advances that we, the people, have managed to bring to our lives over the past century or so. There has been so much senseless killing both by ordinary citizens with combat-level weaponry as well as by law-enforcement officials who are supposed to be protecting us. We’ve taken some big hits in the last few days, weeks, and months with promises of much more to come.
A Supreme Court stacked with partisan GOP hacks who lied to Congress to get on their benches has overturned Roe v. Wade. Why? I honestly don’t know. If you truly believe that life begins at conception, then you simply shouldn’t get an abortion. There are plenty of people who do not believe that life begins until birth. Why should one group hold sway over the other? None of the people who oppose the practice seems remotely interested in the welfare of any baby the second it squeezes out into the world, but they are bound and determined to get the thing out here anyway. Not only do they not care what happens to it, they will also fight to the death against any program or legislation that tries to help it live its post-utero life.
To be clear, nobody, as far as I know, wants to get an abortion. It may be one of the most traumatic choices a woman will ever have to make in her life. Our physical beings are designed to reproduce. We are all so pumped full of hormones and instincts that at an extremely early age we start to feel compelled to replicate our species. We are even genetically wired to want to protect the young of any species. We are triggered by signals like large eyes and bigger heads on tiny bodies. The most jaded of us can’t help but experience an “aww” moment looking at a kitten or a puppy or a baby no matter how much we would like to try and pretend otherwise. Choosing to stop a developing clump of cells that is slowly starting to come together to form one of those things is a decision that costs the person making it dearly.
As human beings, we all experience a constant struggle between our brains and our instincts. Our innate impulses, no matter how strong, are not always dependable. Our brains have grown to the point over countless generations that they can mostly keep these impulses in check. Our brains can see further down the path of consequences than our guts can.
The Supreme Court Justices who voted to abolish Roe v. Wade are a truly sorry lot. Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh have solid histories of denigrating women. They have been publicly humiliated by women who have testified against their reprehensible past behaviors. They fear women. Keeping women as second-class citizens seems to be the only way that they can keep their power. Justice Barrett, a woman, was brought up in a cult that preaches to its members that women are not worth as much as men. That is how she was raised. That kind of conditioning is hard to move beyond. She claims to be an Originalist, meaning that she believes that the Constitution should be interpreted the way the Founding Fathers intended. If she really believed that she would not be sitting on the Bench. The Founding Fathers did not ever envision a woman sitting there. How little self-esteem must this woman have to cause her to fight for her power to be taken away and given to a group of men?
The Founding Fathers also did not ever envision a black man sitting there. Justice Thomas is the one that I really don’t get. He clearly has every intention of repealing the very freedoms that give him the power and position he currently has. Again, I ask why? Why on earth would he align himself with a bunch of white supremacists? He is married to a white woman. If the racial reforms we have are dismantled as the GOP is fighting so hard to do, does he think he’s going to be exempt from the resulting discrimination? Does he think that HIS interracial marriage will be OK, while the rest get torn down?
The gun thing, I simply do not understand either. To my dying day, I will never understand why anyone needs a gun. I get that people want them; I just don’t get why people think they need them. In the last few days, we finally got the most rudimentary of legislation controlling some gun sales through the Senate. Why? Not because children are routinely being murdered in their classrooms. Not because people of color are being gunned down in the streets. No, we got that legislation through, because a man with a gun was picked up near the home of one of the craven GOP-appointed Justices of the Supreme Court.
So, why should we celebrate the 4th of July? Why fight for this country when the United States of America is clearly coming apart at the seams?
Well, for one thing, there are still more of US than there are of THEM. The overwhelming majority of people who live in this country still support a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body. The overwhelming majority of people in this country still believe that Justice Thomas should be able to marry anyone he chooses, whatever he might think. The overwhelming majority of people in this country still believe that Michael and I should be allowed to live our lives as a married couple.
Even our right to choose who we want to lead us is under attack. The same people who don’t want us to be able to marry whom we chose or make choices that concern only us also don’t want us to be able to vote. They want to be able to decide for themselves what the outcome of an election should be no matter the majority opinion. If we do not all start taking a more active role in our elections, then that is exactly what is going to happen, and it will be nobody’s fault but our own. There are more of US than there are of THEM, but we are giving THEM the power to make decisions governing US.
We must stand up and say, “No.” And we can. For the moment. That is why we should still celebrate the founding of this country.
The Wright Brothers made the first recorded flight on a sand dune in a rickety plane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina over a century ago. It was a start. Eventually, improvements were made to the design. Over time, ideas about how to make a heavier-than-air object fly were changed and improved upon. Nobody has ever said that we shouldn’t use a jet engine or pressurize the cabin because it wasn’t what the original creators imagined. They did not know how to do a lot of things that we now take for granted. Any educated six-year-old knows more about how some things work than the founders of our Constitution did.
The Founding Fathers owned slaves. They didn’t have indoor plumbing. They didn’t have electricity. Bleeding a person was considered a great way to cure whatever ailed them. Women couldn’t own property or vote. People of color were not even considered to be people, for heaven’s sake. In theory, we have evolved since then. Our laws and practices should evolve too.
Provincetown, Massachusetts is a great example of what America could be. Where else can you watch a straight family with little kids walking down the street chatting amiably with two older muscle daddies in ass-less chaps? Pretty much anything goes in Provincetown. Everyone is out and about living their best lives whether in full glorious drag or just out of bed with messy, uncombed hair and dressed in t-shirts and shorts. The only people who aren’t here are the small and narrow-minded and it shows. The kids who are here are growing up with a broad acceptance of the people around them. They are accepting of everyone because their parents are. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have brought their kids here.
The rest of the country could be like Provincetown if we choose to let it happen. We could stop worrying about how each other looks or how each other chooses to dress or chooses to be with. Instead, together, we could all start cleaning up our beautiful little planet. We still have the power to do that, but we won’t if we don’t start exercising that power. Use it or lose it.
America is worth fighting for. Just because there is a minority of people who want to concentrate power in the straight white male population does not mean that the rest of us need to agree to that. There are more of just about everyone else than there are straight white males. They should have a voice, but why should they have a louder voice than anyone else? There is a glorious cacophony of voices in this country and all of them deserve a chance to be heard. With each successive election, more and more of those voices get silenced. If the GOP has its way, that will be in 2024. Once they finish gerrymandering the system to fit their needs, that will be it. We won’t be able to say that we will win back the lost seats in the next elections because there won’t be one.
Use it now or lose it forever.
Happy Birthday, America. I hope you had a wonderful day. You’re great but you need a major overhaul. So, let’s get to it.
Very well said
Thanks…needed this this morning. Back to sending some $, doing community work to get out the vote, and writing More Postcards to voters to educated on issues. We all can do small movements to create a big wave.