They Overturned Roe

When Alito’s draft was leaked in early May, it was a gut-punch, even though I knew it was coming. Isn’t a gut punch the violence of reality, this reality without joy or justice? Today I am not surprised, there is no gut punch, maybe because I try to learn from pain to understand how it feels for the next time. Or because after these last two plus years I am somewhat dead inside.

I won’t be taking to the streets today. I did in May, at a rally at Foley Square. I left feeling worse, especially after the representative from Planned Parenthood took the stage and yelled “Wake Up!”. I am awake, awake enough to know we need to stop preaching to the converted and sharing memes on Instagram and think they will do anything. I’m awake, and old enough, to know there is no single, clear path forward for success, and that it is completely possible that I won’t see the constitutional right to bodily autonomy re-established in my lifetime. I am 48, almost 49, the same age as the Roe decision, 1973.

There are so many reasons to take to the streets- solidarity, visibility, anger, love, collective grieving, to physically take the street, to let the powers that be that the people are more than the enforcers, we are more powerful together and they work for us. Today I will pass. Today it is not for me. Previously, for decades, it was. Right now it isn’t. 

The long arc of Republican gerrymandering and manipulation is in the process of cementing itself. 2016 was reported as the first year in this country when there were more white deaths than white births, an undercurrent that has quickened white supremacists aka the government. The tide is turning, we are a more racially and ethnically diverse country. This government and country has always been a patriarchal and white supremacist brutality. Trump didn’t introduce that, he exposed how far a white man can go without the veil of genteel politics and reaching across the aisle to get what you want, the Republican party forgave everything he did because they got what they wanted, regardless of the method or cost. 

I can’t help but feel like we are playing hearts with someone shooting the moon, taking all the hearts, that is, all the points. For so many of us, that’s what the eight years of the Obama presidency did, it gave us a false sense of security (no matter how you consider the actual policies) that the US had a black family in the White House and the Republican Party was over. That the US was moving forward as a country in a post-racial America. 

A lot of people who could have told us we were wrong, but ignorance and comfort is bliss. I was a part of that, someone who thought in forward progress in terms of humanity. And these last 6 years have been hell. It feels like a long time, but each and every one of us must be prepared for a longer fight, not only on the abortion front, but on every single issue of liberation, all of these issues are intertwined. Roe overturning is the most immediate threat for a major percentage of the US population, the largest betrayal of the government to our physical and mental health, the most menacing affront to our rights. 

But every single minute of every single day, people are experiencing devastating, immediate  affronts to their rights, well-being and lives…housing, food, medical care, love, children, justice, freedom. And these  are just as devastating as this decision, it’s just not as vocal and visible a collective. We don’t just fight for abortion, we fight for all of us. 

We are in the plateau of a declining white population that is trying to make permanent white status quo through voter gerrymandering and making all of us fight for crumbs, regardless of what our inalienable rights are supposed to be. What happens when we get to the point of no return, where it doesn’t make a difference how many people show up for Stacey Abrams, that it will never work? This isn’t a get out the vote rally cry, this is a keep voting even while it feels like it’s not working because it’s just barely holding things at bay. It’s one of the tools in the box, and while right now it feels pretty anemic, I hope (I still have hope????) that changes. It’s not a magic pill.

We cannot just be completely apathetic to voting, because I think that will lead to those who are privileged enough to stop fighting, and those who are not to continually exhaust themselves. This, and every fight, is long. Our sense of history is short. It’s a design plan of the white man. Black people in this country, stolen and forced labor, have fought for generations from enslavement, many people fighting for something they wouldn’t see in their lifetime. I don’t write this to be like “It’s so inspiring!” or “How resilient!” I write it as a fact to recalibrate our minds and senses of purposes. I write this to white people whose senses of urgencies pass like the wind. We keep celebrating battles like we won the war, the Women’s March, the day Biden was announced president. We post about a GoFundMe and overwhelm it for a day, then walk away. We need to be more consistent and steadfast. We need to know it’s just a t-shirt or a donation, it’s not enough to change these rulings. 

The people most affected by this ruling are the people affected most by all the rulings, the Black and Brown communities our forefathers didn’t see for the rights in their constitution. Marginal and vulnerable communities are so because our government doesn’t allow them the same support and rights it does for white people. That’s it. The people making these decisions also do not see these bodies as equal to white bodies, and so much of our legislation is a twofold goal–criminalize people and maintain the status quo of white supremacy. Double down with fear. 

The most vulnerable and marginalized people had problems accessing abortion when it was the law of the land, the same way that people in this city were illegally evicted during the eviction moratorium. They were lied to and railroaded. For a lot of white people, the common sense is that the law is on your side and that’s not right. That’s not the world a lot of folks live in, so the constant scrolling of information on social media and the outlets you read need to break through your self-constructed world into someone else’s world to work. We need to change what we’re doing. It is not working. 

The last two and a half years in this country have been collectively and individually brutal for most of us. As we move to a new reality living with COVID, with over a million US COVID deaths, so many politicians have decided that rather than help people, rather than do something about corporate price-gouging or health insurance, they have prioritized outlawing personal health decisions regarding sexuality and reproductive rights, banning the teaching of actual American history in schools, passing a nationwide ruling legalizing concealed gun in a murderous country, and even in this fake liberal bastion of NYC raise the rent on people in stabilized apartments and refuse to pass the Good Eviction clause. See these fuckers for who they are. They have been telling us in a shameless manner for a while now.

“It is a complex state of being to hold hope with one hand and prepare for death with the other.” My friend Dara Greenwald wrote that in an email over ten years ago before her early death from cancer. She had been told there was no further medical treatment for her, to consider hospice care and her eventual death. Dara was one of the first activists I ever met, with a wicked sense of humor and true commitment to fighting for people’s rights. The future in this country is wildly cruel, there are power moves being made for white supremacists to maintain a fascist power while orchestrating this circus of laws to oppress us and yet still present as a democracy. We have to fight, and stay consistent, and try to find joy to be consistent, even when all of the news is so grim. The alternative is worse.