While I am not at a loss for words, when it came to this, I am far better off sharing someone else's
Dear Reader is likely well aware of where I lean when it comes to reproductive rights. While it was coming for a long time, the SCOTUS decision this past week and the coming expected rollbacks of any and all decent progress concerning reproductive rights, gay marriage and body autonomy by this sick, depraved and shameful Supreme Court foisted upon us by the evangelical lugnuts has led me to share something with you. I cannot speak about such things as I am in such a state about the state of this nation that I. Just. Can't. At the moment.
As I strip my house and pack boxes once again for a future that is utterly unknown to me, the news of SCOTUS decisions concerning gun ownership (expanded) and female body autonomy (stripped away) have underscored and re-emphasized my interest in and commitment to getting away from a country which has been downgraded from its once shining city on a hill status as a democracy. I've had Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump playing in the background as I once again wrap the last of my belongings in bubble wrap for a move to God knows where.
On several occasions in the movie, Gump states, "This is all I have to say about that." Gump is a simpleton, but a decent and good simpleton driven by love, respect for country and the gentle acceptance of all life as it is, not as we would impose our will on it. Since I am full of deep grief and abiding anger at what we have allowed to happen in the country of my birth, I'll let those words stand for me, and present something brilliant instead, for on these topics I am not feeling particularly brilliant.
I will instead share with you a gorgeous piece of literary history which gets me off the hook. In this week's Marginalian, Maria Popova offers us a chunk of life with us which points out the ignorant, illiterate, scathingly idiot actions of people who have been entrusted with the health and lives of the women of this nation and in doing so, the influence of this failed state of ours around the world:
Maria Popova
For me, this says it all:
A world without the option of abating an ill-conceived life before it has begun is a world that dooms millions to Victor Frankenstein’s fate. What a pause-giving thought: that a girl not yet nineteen, who lived two centuries ago, has a finer moral compass than the Supreme Court of the world’s largest twenty-first-century democracy.
America long ago lost its way. We are in too many ways a failed state. It gives me no pleasure to say this. But we are a country which hates women, despises minorities and sees the rest of the world and all her people as little more than resources to suck dry.
There are many good people in this country, but too many who did not exercise their sacred responsibility to vote, and who stood aside while the highly motivated and deeply dangerous religious right invaded the DNA of America like a terrible cancer.
As a veteran, once a patriot, a woman who has suffered plenty at the hands of bad men in this country, the way I see it, America needs to fail utterly. The America which exists today does not deserve to continue if we want to claim any kind of moral leadership. We are not leaders. We are an embarrassment, and the world sees us for what we are.
We need to fail. We have failed. And in that complete and utter failure, perhaps at some point we will be able to rise and remake ourselves from the bitter ashes of what we burned to the ground. I hope so. But I will not be here to witness it.
And that's all I have to say about that.
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