How's Your Rage Doing?
Here, let me tell you about mine
I don’t always live in a state of existential dread.
Most days, I stuff as much political information as I can inside my squishy frontal lobe, assign it a category (“business as usual”, “fascism”, “my-God-is-anybody-else-seeing-this?”), write tartly worded emails to the appropriate parties, call my representatives, and then rant about it on social media.
I vote in every election, even from afar. I care deeply, although I wish I didn’t. With wistful envy, I watch those of my friends who manage to exist in self-imposed information deserts, and know I’d never make it. I’m a news junkie. I think too much. It’s important to accept one’s limitations.
But lately, I’ve been waking up in a cold sweat. Not a metaphorical one, but an actual cold sweat of fear and dread. As an American living abroad, I can see my native country with unnatural clarity. Frankly, what I see is terrifying—terrifying enough to make me want to write about it here.
There are a million opinions on what’s wrong with America right now, and I hesitated before throwing one more into the mix, especially on a platform I like to describe as “thoughtful entertainment.” But when I lived in the U.S., I didn’t have the kind of perspective that time and distance now afford me.
So, if you will indulge my despair, let me tell you what I see.
The Supreme Court is about to eviscerate a woman’s right to choose if and when she becomes a mother. For those of you who aren’t women, or are past childbearing age, or feel as though you have no skin in this game, let me put this disaster in its proper context. Whether you are pro-abortion or anti-abortion doesn’t matter. You are welcome to your opinion. But no one has the right to legislate whether a woman becomes a mother, especially if that woman is forced to give birth in a country without paid maternity leave, without universal healthcare, and without universal childcare. This is nothing more than reproductive servitude. It’s a Margaret Atwood novel without the bawdy farce.
In terms of violating personal liberties, forcing a woman to carry her pregnancy to term is no different than telling a man he can’t get a vasectomy or purchase erectile dysfunction medication. Look around—the world is moving in the exact opposite direction when it comes to women’s reproductive health. Argentina just legalized abortion. Northern Ireland just legalized abortion. Know where abortion isn’t legal? Afghanistan. And as of this week, in all likelihood, the United States of America.
Three-quarters of Americans want to keep Roe v. Wade in place. After fifty years of access to safe, legal abortions, it’s not an unreasonable request. But a highly politicized Supreme Court is about to disenfranchise that three-quarters of Americans, and I suspect it will ultimately pay a price for that. I don’t say it because I want it to be true, but because the institution itself will reap the whirlwind for that and other recent decisions, starting with Citizens United and continuing to its disembowelment of the Voting Rights Act.
This isn’t good news. As part of our system of checks and balances, we need a Supreme Court. But when the Supreme Court votes from a place of deep-seated religious bigotry instead of democracy and law, we are no better than countries like Afghanistan. And I seriously doubt that three-quarters of the U.S. is going to take this decision sitting down. It will be war.
No longer do we have a country of Democrats and Republicans; we have ideologues and fascists. We have a country riven by suspicion and hatred. We have Mark Zuckerberg’s Libertarian-when-it-suits-him wet dream of a social media platform disseminating fake news, Rupert Murdoch (who isn’t even American) running the Fox Broadcast Network like some anti-vaxx, neo-Nazi barracks, and we have the man himself, Donald J. Trump, puttering around Mar-a-Lago and spewing out crazed, poorly worded, grammatically embarrassing newsletters.
These three entities, more than any others, have brought us to where we are today, which is on the brink of anarchy.
I love my country. I don’t want to see American democracy die. But what other logical outcome is there? If we rein in Fox News and Facebook, we are violating the very First Amendment principles upon which our country was founded. Yes, we could reinstate The Fairness Doctrine, which would guarantee a noncommercial sector of America’s airwaves. But how are we going to do that with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema preening their obstructionist feathers in the limelight of their new-found fame? Democrats are operating with the slimmest of majorities, and the legislative body moves with agonizing slowness, if at all.
Joe Lunchbucket doesn’t care about the First Amendment. Joe wants a job. He wants healthcare. He wants his kids to go to a school where they are not likely to die in a hail of gunfire. He wants to turn on his kitchen faucet and drink water that won’t give him cancer. Abstractions like LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, curbing the excesses of Wall Street—issues that are near and dear to my heart—mean nothing to him. And yet, Democrats ignore this swath of the voting public at their peril.
Which brings us back to the panic I feel every time I tune into American news. We don’t have school shootings here in Europe. Healthcare is universal. In fact, Malta is the only EU country where abortion is illegal, although there are myriad ways around that restriction. It’s true that an anti-immigration rightwing movement is alive and well in Europe, but people can still break bread together. They’re not at each other’s throats. That’s because we don’t have Fox News.
So, what’s going to happen once the Supreme Court makes its ruling on abortion?
Hoping to avoid an altercation with a disapproving public, Justice Roberts will likely kick Roe down to the state level. States’ rights has been the Republicans’ big O since time immemorial, for reasons just like this one. We will then have “abortion states,” and “non-abortion states.” A woman’s right to receive a safe, legal abortion will get punted like the political football it is every 4-6 years, depending on who’s in charge. But it won’t stop there. Fox News will continue its massively lucrative crusade against “snowflake” liberals. Hostilities will get much worse. Who knows how much longer the United States will remain united?
This could actually have a positive effect on elections, depending on how badly gerrymandered and voting restrictive the state. “One-issue voters” are not unheard of. You’ll have plenty of Democratic candidates jockeying for office. But unless President Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer can find a way to pass their voting rights bill, what are the Democrats’ chances for success? Biden, et al., could certainly waive the filibuster, and might have to, but that could come back to bite them if and when the Republicans regain control. Although it’s likely the Republicans will behave like mad dogs, regardless of what the Democrats do or don’t do.
They will certainly howl like dogs if Biden expands the Court, which may be the only way to save our democracy in the long term. So far, Biden has shown little interest in doing so. Or he may be saving it as his Hail Mary.
Something tells me we may need one.
We’re at Def Con-1 here, America. The time to bombard your representatives is now. The time to organize on the streets is now. The time to get voters registered is now. It’s up to us, not them.
Don’t get me wrong, we have allies on Capitol Hill, but they need our help. And as tempting as it is to think that your cries go unheeded, even out on the street with a sign in your hand, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Your country needs you. There are more of us than there are of them, but none of that matters if we don’t mobilize. Call. If you can, do it every day. Write. If you can, do it every day. Get your like-minded friends and family to call and write. This works if we do it together, one phone call at a time, one email at a time, one protest at a time, one vote at a time.
Contact information for all U.S. Senators: here.
Contact information for all U.S. Representatives: here.
Contact the White House: here.
Contact the Supreme Court: here.
How do you prefer making your voice heard? I sincerely want to hear your story. Please feel free to comment in the section below.
Thank you so much for sharing your perspective, this is very clear and compelling. It's very difficult to imagine what things must look like from an outsider's perspective, so this is great. I often think about moving my family and I aboard for a while to experience another culture/political system, it seems like a worth-while endeavor from what you've shared!
Here in Portland, we've yet to recover from 2020's Summer of Rage. There are still shops in downtown with boarded-up windows, and the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict spawned yet another riot in the downtown core. The rage in Portland, and the damage it's done to the city I love, has fundamentally changed my relationship with my adopted hometown. There's so much lingering anger, so much homelessness...and the list goes on. Sometimes I wonder if it might not be worth moving, but every place has its own problems.
America is a nation sorely in need of some good weed....