Joan Walsh - Talk Me Down Here: Can This Country Be Saved?

[Nevilledog]

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Daria Steigman
@dariasteigman
THIS from @joanwalsh: "The oligarchical, misogynistic right wing wants a world where abortions don’t happen and guns are everywhere, which means more Ams.—w/o abortion rights, many more women—will die." Agree w/ Joan: pls talk me down (or bring me 🍸🍸🍸 .

thenation.com
Talk Me Down Here: Can This Country Be Saved?
A backward, oligarchal, misogynist minority is trampling the rights and will of the majority—and it’s only getting worse.
1:29 PM · Jun 2, 2022

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democracy-roe-mass-shootings/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/vdTPL

May was an awful month. From the leak of the draft Supreme Court ruling striking down abortion rights in the United States on May 3, to the massacre of 10 Black people in Buffalo, N.Y., by a white supremacist May 14, to the slaughter of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Tex., just last week, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that we are, increasingly, two nations, where the minority is trampling the rights of the majority, and is literally willing to kill some of us to establish its rule.

Most Americans want to keep abortion legal, with some restrictions, and support sensible gun safety reform. But we will get neither. Our entire system of government, from the Electoral College to the Senate, from the filibuster rules to the Republican-packed Supreme Court, privileges the views of the minority over the majority.

The triple punch of Roe, Buffalo, and Uvalde made me think apocalyptically about whether we ultimately wind up two countries. Maybe we already are. The oligarchical, misogynistic right wing wants a world where abortions don’t happen and guns are everywhere, which means more Americans—and without abortion rights, many more women—will die. Contrary to Barack Obama’s famous formulation at the 2004 Democratic convention, there is a Red America and a Blue America, and the leaders of Red America, and most of the Republican Party, hate the country we’ve become.

Ironically, it was in 2004, after George W. Bush narrowly defeated John Kerry—in the popular vote this time, not merely thanks to the Supreme Court and the Electoral College—that I first remember looking at the map of Bush v. Kerry and seeing how much Bush’s win relied on the former Confederacy (as well as, to be fair, every state between the Mississippi River and the West Coast). I remember a friend talking about how the blue states should secede this time—we subsidize those backward red states with our tax dollars, remember—and I dismissed the idea immediately.

*snip*

[bucolic_frolic]

1. We're all just rats in a maze

Alpha rats eat the rest.

[Bobstandard]

3. Not quite correct.

The alpha rats eat one or two betas, then the betas turn on each other.

I listen to my local talk radio and the magats are itching fo violence in their own neighborhoods! I think we’ll see the first of this behavior at the polling stations. I live in a very blue area but the Magats on radio have heard about the plans to disrupt polling in Mass or MI or where ever the recently revealed memos target, and claim they’re going to do it here.

They also keep talking about ‘the second amendment solution’ and name local politicians and even ‘that guy on my block with the Biden signs’.

Whoever said ‘ when someone tells you something, believe it the first time’ was wise and we should all take a lesson

[slightlv]

4. I think you're right,

but I think their thinking is wrong. They misjudged just how important this is to us. We see the knock-on effects to ALL of us coming afterwards, even before they began opening their mouths and speaking the quiet parts out loud. There are also a lot of parts they haven't said yet, and we know already know those, too. We've already lived those, as well. And we refuse to go back. Abortion is just the first card. If we let that be taken away, the rest of the house of cards falls too. Women will have no rights, whatsoever. We go back to the 1800's. We will be slaves to our bodies, to men, to religion. Women will be jailed, executed, die because of lack of health care. We will not go back. Period. We will riot in the streets. And so will the men who support us.

The problem will be so will the men who oppose us. The 3%'ers, the Proud Boys, the others who want to put us down. The ones who want the race wars. The misogynists. The white men for whom any amount of power seen given to women means power stripped from them. We have been here before. We hoped not to be here again, but here we are. We fought hard the first time. We were jailed; we were beaten and tear-gassed before. We will be beaten and tear-gassed again. This time, for many of us, our bodies will not withstand the beatings and gassing, let alone what the testosterone incels can and will do. But we will fight. We may no longer have a reason to fight as far as abortion or reproductive health is concerned, personally. But we have daughters; we have granddaughters, nieces, friends, and generations of women yet unborn we fight for.

We will not back down. We will not go back.