Hekate
Hekate's JournalWell, we could go all French Revolution on everyone we hate & just litter DC with headless corpses....
Or, we could watch the DOJ and various State AGs go thru the tedious and painstaking — and did I mention tedious — process of creating a legally prosecutable case for a trial by jury, and subsequent to that we could watch all that trial by jury nonsense thru to its conclusion.
Yes, I do. America, along with most of the rest of the world, is taking a hard right turn...
It seems we are in one of “those places” in world history, and it really is not all about us.
Regarding the US, we have a population that is more ill-educated and ill-informed than ever before. They are frightened (social change, climate change, pandemic, lots of things), and frightened people are angry. Trump has molded his followers into a mob, and mobs are irrational and dangerous, yet easily-enough they can be aimed — at the Capitol, for instance.
In such situations, people look for a strongman to make it all go away. They want certainty, not freedom. Oh sure, they’ll bleat about their personal freedom, but what they want is a strongman to tell them what’s what, and who The Other is so they can blame the Other for their problems.
Trump only looks unique. In some ways maybe he is, yet he is paving the way for American strongmen to come, people with more brains and a longer vision. And such people are fine with chaos as a way to ascend to power.
We are, I think, at a turning point in history across the world. It will be very difficult to effectively pull together on climate change or the pandemic under the circumstances. Chaos-leaders and strongmen don’t gain much, if anything, by encouraging their populations to unite around anything but themselves.
We are fortunate to have Joe Biden as a respite. Oddly enough, I felt exactly the same about Barack Obama, coming as he did after 8 years of BushCheney. Obama wasn’t the answer to all our problems: he was a respite and a chance for us to get our act together. Instead, we got Trump and the mother of all backlashes.
Well, this is bleak. Yet — there is hope. There is always hope. I think we know what to do.
Right now I know 9 people who are sick or recovering, 8 of them related to me, 1 vaxxed, all LOVED
All loved. 
Because women are not stupid in the face of calamity, & this is a calamity. "Entitled" my elbow
The Great Depression also saw a dip in births. WWII sent a lot of young men away, but that was after the Great Depression had done its part. Many women delayed childbearing if they possibly could, because they could not afford babies.
My generation’s demographic bulge, the Baby Boom, occurred not just because the men came home but because there were jobs for them — lots of union jobs in manufacturing, with good wages.
As for the COVID pandemic, the governmental and societal structures that were fragile and/or rotten have collapsed in front of our eyes. If I were of childbearing age, I’d wait too.
That is my thumbnail sketch of the economics of it. Women are not stupid.
Of course, one “cure” for it is to outlaw abortion and contraception.
“Entitled” my rosy Irish ass.
As community hospitals have closed over the past 20+ years, Catholic hospitals have filled the gap
As you probably know by now, the old non-profit model has been pretty much wiped out. Without going in to all the reasons why that has been the case, it has left a lot of people in the lurch.
The Roman Catholic Church — or rather various orders within it — see medical practice as part of their charitable mission. Of course, in order to financially survive, they can’t do this for free and have to deal with insurance companies and all the rest just like everybody else. But to give them credit, they are there when others have gone away.
HOWEVER, when a hospital is run by a religious organization, it follows that religion’s doctrines. Thanks to every Republican president from Reagan on, they have been given tremendous latitude to do exactly that in regards to women’s health care needs. If a woman wants good prenatal care and a good birthing experience, she’ll very likely have that. If she wants contraception, Plan B, Morning After, or any form of pregnancy termination, she is SOL.
The rest if the family — the men and the children — can expect all their medical needs to be met. Women will also actually be well taken care of as long as they don’t expect reproductive rights.
I am 100% certain that he “sold to them specifically” because they were they only ones who would step in, out there hundreds and hundreds of miles from anywhere else.
When put to an actual vote by the electorate, these extreme bills fail. That's why legislatures did
… the dirty deed themselves — and that’s why voter suppression bills were taken to state legislatures as well.
That’s also why the extreme RW has worked so hard for so long to get “their kind” onto the Supreme Court.
The one thing that keeps me from completely giving up on this country is that time after time the actual majority of its citizens votes for the Democrat for POTUS.
The thing that makes me utterly despair is how corrupted the system has become, and how very much we have fallen into a rule by minority.
I know. When I reference Bush the Lesser, know that my early years at DU were littered with brave...
… pronouncements about this being “my country” since the 1600s and how I’m not giving up and/ or leaving.
But that was long ago, in what amounts to another country, and besides, Dame Liberty is on her deathbed.
It’s not just America, either — we see outside better than we see ourselves, surely. There is a wave of authoritarianism/autocracy sweeping the globe, including in nations that once, in the 20th Century, looked to the US to supply leadership and soldiers to help them bring down the fascists, by whatever name. Only now our own democracy hangs by a thread, and we women are just the latest target.
I’m sorry to be a downer. We need people to still believe and still fight, and I hope you are one — indeed I hope your name is Legion.
How we got here. What is at stake today in the SCOTUS
All of the advances that women have made in the last 50 years actually will go away if the Right Wing gets what they want out of this court.
How, you ask? Because anti-choice is, at first and last, anti-woman, and that means all our choices are in the mix. Contraception, birth control, welfare assistance, childcare, parental leave, jobs and career advancement — all of it.
They’ve been laying the social groundwork forever by redefining the most popular and effective contraceptives as abortifacients. They’ve been lying to teenagers for decades, saying condoms are completely ineffective against both disease and pregnancy.
They’ve laid legal groundwork by making sure that the US Congress inserted “conscience clauses” into every piece of health legislation — so that employers/insurers, hospitals, doctors and pharmacists all have a legal out for not only refusing to provide for abortions but for refusing to cover/provide Plan B, Morning After, contraceptive pills and contraceptive devices. The Hyde Amendment was introduced as a compromise, and somehow it has never gone away.
Legal groundwork at the state level has included “personhood” laws, and when that was too direct they did an end-run by defining the murder of a pregnant woman as a double-homicide. They’ve intruded on the health crisis that is addiction, not by providing support to beat the addiction but by imprisoning pregnant women for endangering their fetuses. They’ve worked to broaden the definition of what endangers a fetus — where there is a miscarriage, there must be a woman at fault.
Are you beginning to get the picture now?
It goes further. When Roe vs Wade was decided, it superseded state laws — but state legislatures saw no need to actually remove those old laws from the books. It may have been lazy thinking at the time, but at some point someone realized that if Roe goes away, the old laws come back automatically unless they have since been overturned by the state — and by that time the culture wars were in full swing.
They have been relentless, in part because Gawd is on their side and in part because women are just too uppity for their own good, but hey, same thing in the end. When one legislative maneuver fails, they try another in a different state, then return and try again.
That’s all I can say for now. There’s so much more.
I was in college when Roe became law. I was glad, and at the same time conflicted. At some point I came to understand that the anti-abortion hysteria was not all about nasty entitled women aborting fully-formed adorable Gerber babies (as the RW likes to portray the situation, thus trying to make every one of us ashamed to speak out in support of abortion), but it was truly about contraception and the ability to prevent pregnancy in the first place. And contraception is foundational to absolutely every advance we women have made in the last century. That’s where we are going.
All of the advances that women have made in the last 50 years actually will go away if "they" get...
…what they want out of this court.
How, you ask? Because anti-choice is, at first and last, anti-woman, and that means all our choices are in the mix. Contraception, birth control, welfare assistance, childcare, parental leave, jobs and career advancement — all of it.
They’ve been laying the social groundwork forever by redefining the most popular and effective contraceptives as abortifacients. They’ve been lying to teenagers for decades, saying condoms are completely ineffective against both disease and pregnancy.
They’ve laid legal groundwork by making sure that the US Congress inserted “conscience clauses” into every piece of health legislation — so that employers/insurers, hospitals, doctors and pharmacists all have a legal out for not only refusing to provide for abortions but for refusing to cover/provide Plan B, Morning After, contraceptive pills and contraceptive devices. The Hyde Amendment was introduced as a compromise, and somehow it has never gone away.
Legal groundwork at the state level has included “personhood” laws, and when that was too direct they did an end-run by defining the murder of a pregnant woman as a double-homicide. They’ve intruded on the health crisis that is addiction, not by providing support to beat the addiction but by imprisoning pregnant women for endangering their fetuses. They’ve worked to broaden the definition of what endangers a fetus — where there is a miscarriage, there must be a woman at fault.
Are you beginning to get the picture now?
It goes further. When Roe vs Wade was decided, it superseded state laws — but state legislatures saw no need to actually remove those old laws from the books. It may have been lazy thinking at the time, but at some point someone realized that if Roe goes away, the old laws come back automatically unless they have since been overturned by the state — and by that time the culture wars were in full swing.
They have been relentless, in part because Gawd is on their side and in part because women are just too uppity for their own good, but hey, same thing in the end. When one legislative maneuver fails, they try another in a different state, then return and try again.
That’s all I can say for now. There’s so much more.
I’m your age. At some point I realized it was not all about nasty entitled women aborting fully-formed adorable Gerber babies (as the RW likes to portray the situation, thus trying to make every one of us ashamed to speak out), but it was truly about contraception and the ability to prevent pregnancy in the first place. And contraception is foundational to absolutely every advance we women have made in the last century. That’s where we are going.
In years past, I have read that some people knew instantly that the country had lost its innocence...
… and optimism on that day.
I was 16 — and felt deeply wounded, but not that. I resisted conspiracy theories for many years. It took all the events of the 1960s to unfold to bury that much of my innocence. It took so many assassinations, and the Vietnam war.
How sad that some here have seen fit to dismiss, almost mock, our memories.
For those who don’t know, who were not there, let me say that Jack and Jackie did bring a sense of Camelot, of youth and glamor and optimism and renewal. They showed an appreciation of classical music and the arts in general. The great cellist Pablo Casals gave a concert at the White House. Jack and Jackie Kennedy brought in accomplished people, some of them as glamorous as themselves and others just incredibly bright. She was shy, but he was quick witted, witty, ready to spar without rancor with the press.
He founded the Peace Corps, and very many of us who were young sent away for the packet, a big envelope stuffed with information, that we held on to for years. When I was in college and ever since then I have met former PCVs, that is Peace Corps Volunteers.
But on this day, 58 years ago, I was a public high school kid on O’ahu making my way through the jammed hallways between home room and chemistry class, when a boy called out that the president had been shot. He must have had a transistor radio. Our school was typical for the time and place: there was no intercom, there were no televisions — but word spread out nonetheless, and by 9:30 our teacher told us that the president had been killed in Dallas. (I’m scratching my head trying to remember my chem teacher’s name, and all I can recall now is that he was Japanese American, served in the US Army in WWII and was sent to be part of the occupying force in Japan after the war ended.)
The shock was incredible. If there was anyone anywhere in the school who thought this murder was a good thing, they kept their mouths well shut. As I was reminded almost daily, most of the white kids in the school were military dependents (not me), and a fair number of those were from the South, strangers in a strange land.
School was not dismissed, but in midday a mass assembly was called in the big courtyard. Words were spoken, probably a prayer as well, and then the best trumpeter in our school band played Taps as the flag was lowered to half-staff.
And home to spend three days glued to the TV in the living room. Watching the funeral. Watching Jack Ruby kill Oswald on live TV, robbing us all of whatever questions Oswald might have answered.
And on with life, my country changed in ways I could not have foretold.
RIP Jack & Jackie Kennedy 
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