Politics Plus

In the upcoming midterm elections, Democrats are hoping for a Blue Wave, while Republicans are hoping for a Red Wave. Both parties, though, and especially Republicans, need to beware another wave – the Pink Wave.

After SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade, there was a major surge in women registering to vote. Women have been raising serious hell since the news of the overturn was leaked. Politicians who support abortion bans are on thin ice, while judges and voters alike are blocking antiabortion laws or finding ways around them. Petitions calling for making reproductive rights the law of the land abound; I have signed and shared a number of them. Some Republicans are even calling for the party to at least review its abortion stance.

Cue the late Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.”

For far too long, women have been second-class citizens of the United States. Our grandmothers, great-grandmothers, great-great-grandmothers, and further back fought like tigresses to secure the right to vote. It took 133 years from when the Constitution was first written down to when women gained suffrage. It took another century for a woman to be elected Vice President of the US. Even today, women are under-represented in government at many levels. We have plenty of ladies in Congress, in state and local positions, even some women governors; but still the percentage of female elected officials does not reflect the percentage of our population that has XX chromosomes. In addition, some of these women are Republicans, members of the very party that is plotting to undo decades of social and moral progress. They are of course entitled to their political views, but supporting the degenerating GOP reeks of hypocrisy.

Women today still face discrimination and bigotry in many fields, as well as healthcare. Female patients frequently suffer arrogant dismissal of their symptoms. Pregnant women are often treated like brood livestock – an OB/GYN’s attention is all too often 100% on the fetus and 0% on the womb-bearer. Even women doctors fall into the trap of prejudice against female patients.

In the job world women are still second best. The gender pay gap still persists, and is worse for women of color than for white women, though it is gradually closing. Women tend to be overlooked for promotions in many fields even when their work is just as good as that of their male peers, if not better. They are underexposed in the art world, which is the reason for the legendary Guerrilla Girls. Of all the people who have won the Best Director Academy Award, so far only one has been a woman.

We women are mad as hell, and we’re not gonna take this anymore. More and more we are flexing our political muscles. Remember the Women’s March in 2017, which caused hobby shops to run out of pink yarn because so many people knitted Pussy Hats? It was the largest single day protest in modern US history, and five and a half years later the activism it stirred up hasn’t ebbed. As mentioned above, there has been a serious uptick in the number of women registering to vote over the last few months. More and more women are running for office, from dogcatcher to State Governor.

The ERA, which should have been part of the Constitution decades ago, may be on the cusp of ratification. The current U.S. Congress has more female members than ever before, the majority of them Democrats; and we voters have an opportunity to increase that number even more this year. The 2022 elections are a watershed that could tip the balance of power back towards Regular Joe and Jane, and reverse many of the gains by the sexist extreme right.

Patriarchs beware: Females of the species are getting politically active and politically savvy. We are women, hear us roar in numbers too big to ignore.

Over the past few months I have been doing a lot of text-banking for the Working Families Party, an organization that has the goal of electing candidates who actually care about the working class. Responses range from enthusiastic to vulgarly opposed. I don’t let the infantile rubbish from the MAGA jerks bother me – it’s their problem, not mine.

A few respondents have answered that voting won’t save us, only revolution will. I say, let’s give the polls one last chance, because ballots are better than bullets. Revolution is not nearly as easy as one may think. So, revolutionaries, how are you going to revolt? Throw bricks and Molotov cocktails? You’ll need to be a lot better organized than a wild mob. And if you have images of Minutemen kicking redcoat butt in your mind, remember that the American colonies succeeded only because they got help from the French and the Spanish.

Before you even contemplate starting a revolution, you need to think about what you will do if you succeed. Revolutions and marriages fail for the same reason: What the participants regard as “That’s all she wrote” is, in reality, just the last paragraph of the prolog. The American Revolution succeeded because the Founding Fathers had a plan to create a new kind of country, a new kind of democracy.

The United States they created was deeply flawed – racist, sexist and elitist. We needed a bloody Civil War to end the evil of slavery, and decades more tumult and protest to end legal discrimination against people of color. Women had to wait till the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 so they could vote, and even after 50 years of marching and hell-raising the ERA still has not been added to the Bill of Rights, though as I write this it may be on the cusp of ratification. Racism, sexism, homophobia and other ills are still rampant; though they are technically illegal, society and culture keep them alive.

I do believe we are at a crossroads, and we have three choices. We can vote out all or at least most of the extremist Republicans who are up for re-election, and turn this country’s course back towards moral and ethical progress. Or we can degenerate further into fascism and oligarchy. Or we can have a revolution.

Revolutions, though, don’t have to be violent. Gandhi used nonviolent means to unite the peoples of India and gain that country’s independence. The former satellites of the Soviet Union, with the notable exception of Romania, threw off the chains of Communism peacefully. Problems still abound as different ethnicities bicker and even fight over who has the right to what land, but at least they initially took the path of irenic change. A successful revolution can involve minimal bloodshed, or none at all.

This is why we need to get out the progressive vote this election. Make sure you are registered to vote, get your progressive kith and kin registered, offer to help people get to polling places, and cast an informed ballot. Do your homework on the candidates, and remember the down-ballot races, because those are where extremists begin their takeover.

The alternatives to using legal, peaceful means to turn our country around are unthinkable.

One favorite meme of the forced-birth crowd is “We should save every fetus because you never know which one will grow up to find a cure for some horrible disease, or write the Great American Novel, or change the course of history.” Yeah, right.

They love to hound reproductive rights activists with, “What if the kid grows up to be another Lincoln or Mozart or Einstein or Reverend King?” Of course they never ponder whether any of the babies they “rescue” will grow up to be another Hitler, or Stalin, or Caligula, or Idi Amin, or Pol Pot, or Chairman Mao. Or another Charles Manson, or Ted Bundy, or John Wayne Gacy, or Timothy McVeigh, or Jeffrey Dahmer. No, they never think about an innocent little tot growing up to be a monster.

The stale “What if so-and-so’s mother had an abortion” male bovine solid bodily waste ejecta has more problems, too. How is the next Great Artist or Great Scientist or Great Leader or Discoverer of a Cure for Some Nasty Malady supposed to become a historical figure in the first place without the proper support network? Abraham Lincoln was born into poverty, but a) he was wanted and loved, b) he had some extraordinary luck, and c) the USA wasn’t waging a war on the poor while he was growing up.

In order to develop their brains so they are Super Scientist/Leader/Artist material, those children require a great start in life. They need housing so they can feel secure and have protection from the elements. They need nutritious food so their brains will develop. They need love and support from their families. They need stimulating toys, books and activities to make them interested in reaching their potential and contributing to society. No child who lives in abject poverty and experiences hunger and malnutrition for the first several years of life is going to grow up to be the Next Big Name.

For starters, how about making sure every womb-bearer has access to affordable prenatal and perinatal care? Pregnant folks need not just proper nutrition, but also the right medical attention, especially if they suffer complications. If you’re in the family way, you need to take special care of yourself to give your little cherub the best possible start in life.

Giving birth is expensive in this country. Even a regular, uncomplicated birth can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars; if any problems arise, up goes the bill. Do NOT get me started on how our for-profit health “care” system stiffs patients, or how insurance companies d*ck their customers around! If you want to force everybody who gets pregnant to give birth, but deny the proper medical attention to increase the chances of a healthy birth, you are the worst kind of hypocrite.

Secondly, too many US residents, citizens and immigrants alike, lack access to proper nutrition. Food is getting more and more expensive, due to not only increasing costs to produce and transport it, but also because droughts and changing weather patterns are causing crop failures. The minimum wage has not increased in 13 years, while the cost of everything has gone up and up and up. Nutritious food costs more than junk food. If you have $8 to spend on dinner and four hungry mouths to feed, and a hamburger costs $2 while a salad costs $8, are you going to spilt the salad four ways? No, you’re going to buy four hamburgers even though they are not as good for you (or the environment) as the salad.

Next, to make sure these Little World Changers can realize their potential, they need the proper schooling. The current education system in the USA is a joke. And who are doing their best to make sure it remains a joke? Republicans, the same people who have appointed themselves controllers of everybody’s naughty bits (except their own, of course). Right-wingers refuse to increase our education budget even while teachers are living like rats and having to buy their own school supplies. US children lag most of the developed world in science and mathematics. Meanwhile, Republicans lose their feces over Critical Race Theory and try to pull books from libraries. How is this country supposed to generate Nobel laureates, the latest in high-tech gadgetry, and amazing treatments and cures when many high-school graduates read at a 5th grade level? The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this country’s educational problems when kids were getting their lessons via ZOOM and parents were struggling to school them while trying to work from home. It’s not enough to create babies with potential – you have to provide them with a well-rounded education, one that actually makes them think for themselves rather than just regurgitate answers.

After all that, they need to survive to adulthood. Perfect safety can never be guaranteed, but we can take reasonable steps to reduce risk. The USA is one of the most gun-happy countries on Earth, if not #1. On average a mass shooting takes place every day; the ones we hear about are the worst in terms of body count and/or location. What if one of the children shot dead in Uvalde would have become a world-changer if only he/she had grown up? Or what if one of them would have sired or given birth to a world changer? And just who most vigorously fight even the most sensible gun laws? Yep – Republicans. The same people who want every conception to get a Social Security number.

Finally, those potential movers and shakers need a college education. (Yes, Steve Jobs was a dropout, but like Lincoln he had some lucky breaks.) College used to be free in the US.  In many countries it is free. I could go on and on and on about predatory loan companies and the crushing debt that saddles graduates; that is, in fact, a topic worthy of its own essay. How are the world changers supposed to be out finding cures for currently incurable maladies, writing the Great American Novel, composing timeless music, running for office, or stirring the masses to fight injustice when they are living in ratholes, working three minimum-wage jobs, and subsisting on beans and rice and ramen?

If the forced-birth crowd really gave a rat’s derriere about human life, they would work to support life after birth. They would be screaming to protect SNAP and WIC, for the minimum wage to be a living wage, for public schools to receive more funding, for health care to be affordable, and for college – at least to the Bachelor’s level – to be free, or at least not so outrageously expensive. They would be demanding that student loans be strictly regulated to avoid usury and curb loan sharking. Instead, they abandon babies at the moment of birth, and howl about socialism, which they confound with Communism. As soon as the babies are born, they are forgotten.

Right-wingers are getting increasingly vicious. I say increasingly because they’ve been vicious for a long time, since way before Trump was elected. Over the past few years, though, their savagery and evil have leveled up.

Kyle Rittenhouse. The car attack in Charlotte. The spa slaughter in Atlanta. Armed vigilantes at polling stations. And, of course, the 6 January putsch. Right-wingers will stop at nothing to impose their fascism on this country, and they could not possibly care less how much blood they shed.

The Republican Party has ceased to be a legitimate political party, and has degenerated into the Donald Trump Fan Club. Republicans don’t give a rat’s behind about this country, or what it is supposed to represent, or anybody other than white, straight, wealthy, fundamentalist Christian men. They are also all too willing to crucify any in their ranks who show any integrity. Look what happened to Liz Cheney when she refused to walk in lock-step with her peers and voted to impeach Trump for inciting the capitol attack. She was stripped of her committee memberships, and even though she had voted with Trump 93% of the time, she just lost a primary election to a Trump toady.

Just the other day I read on NextDoor about a woman whose granddaughter’s residency, and thus eligibility to vote, was challenged. Why? Fortunately, the granddaughter was able to prove her residency was legitimate; unfortunately, this meant sacrificing time and effort. I doubt this was an isolated incident, and am thankful this woman spoke up.

Doctors who provide abortions have received death threats for decades. Now doctors who provide gender-affirming care to transgender children are being targeted. Indeed, it seems that hardly anybody is not a target of the Right. School counselors, public education, libraries – nothing is off limits for them.

Here are some threats that progressive organizations have received from right-wingers. I don’t recall the sources or the targets, but the words are still chilling.

• “I am a hunter — and I think you should be hunted.”
• “You will never be safe in Arizona again.”
• “I’m really jonzing to see your purple face after you’ve been hanged.”
• “I hope you die of COVID and kill your entire f—ing family.” 
• “You should be thrown in jail for being a terrorist.” 
• “Too bad they didn’t abort all you traitor trash Nazi liberals.” 
• “Die where you are standing.” 
• “You insipid morons ALL deserve a bullet.” 
• “Every one of you should be in prison for the rest of your sorry lives.” 
• “I will kill you without remorse.” 
• “You are not an American but a force of evil. I challenge you to a duel to the death. Pick the spot and time within the next 30 days. Your head will be on a pike when this is over you cowardly bastard.” 
• “We are looking for you. If you don’t like our Constitution, then leave or die!”

These sentences demonstrate all too clearly the mentality of the Right. They are absolutely convinced that they are right – in the sense of correct, moral, etc. – so they believe they can get away with anything. Now, where have I heard that before? In their minds, the only good Liberal is a dead Liberal.

Left-wingers, Progressives, Democrats need to stop trying to compromise because the Right will not compromise. Period. You cannot compromise with the increasingly dangerous Right any more than you can compromise with a tornado. We need to stop being Neville Chamberlain and become Winston Churchill.