I am so tired of fighting this fight. I can’t do it anymore.

That was the first thing that came into my head when I read the news about the Supreme Court likely going to overturn Roe v Wade.

Some things I note:
* A leaked draft is highly unusual. Some observers note that it adds pressure to the Court to hand the ruling down without further changes. Others that it will cause the Court to change its mind. ***In either case it makes a (theoretically) apolitical instrument of Democracy suspect.
* It’s 50 years since Roe vs. Wade was decided. Anniversaries are always interesting timing — is this a political gimmick to galvanize voters at an otherwise low interest voting year (midterms)?

These two observations undermine my absolute certainty that overturning Roe v Wade is just the next (perhaps THE big play) of the Republican playbook of authoritarianism. They wouldn’t call it that, of course, it’s just convenient that they simply want to return to a world in which:
— women knew their proper place — in the home, not working or owning property, having babies, submissive to men, unable to handle the responsibility of autonomy
— men knew their proper place — working for their betters, knowing women were there to take care of them and their families, and heterosexual
— men and women knew their proper place — staying the gender assigned at birth, heterosexual, and raising children to be just like them
— PoC knew their place — working for whyte people, making less money, not having sex so they wouldn’t have babies (making sexuality irelevant, but being hetero nonetheless), striving to look as much like whyte people as possible, staying in their own communities except when working for whyte people, accepting the lowest levels of education, money, and power (reserved for the men only) to support the capitalist structure, and unable to vote
— Non-whyte people wishing to come here from another country need not apply, unless they are willing to work outside the law as less-than-humans OR in technical industries OR in education.
— Non heterosexuals and those who feel they were incorrectly assigned a gender at birth kill themselves so as not to be a burden on society.
The only exceptions are the very few who escape the strictures to become the stories told to support the narrative that the American Dream is available to all.

Americans live in a system based on exploitation. It’s a system in which labor is valued as low as it possibly can be, where “minimum wage” isn’t (and hasn’t been for more than two decades), in which every aspect of social support is barely coping with the numbers of people relying on it to live, where the population is large enough that our so-called leaders know that they don’t need to fix the system — it is designed to do exactly what it is doing: supporting the wealthy to live out their fantastical lives while in no way touching those of “ordinary people”. Any attempt by ordinary people to attain self-sufficiency or health is harassed into extinction. And its worse for non-whytes, non-AMAB, non heterosexuals . . . so much worse.

We have data, really good long-time-tested and validated data that shows us that the #1 way to reduce the number of abortions is to give people education about how to prevent babies. The #2 way to achieve that result is to make contraception easily available for little cost. If ANY OTHER “solution” does not reduce abortions, then any other argument is not about “preventing deaths,” its about something else.

It’s about something else.

I mean, come on, people with resources have always had access to education, divorce, abortion, same sex relationships, living as the gender you feel, not assigned at birth. It’s all in the biographies. It’s fact. They are so far beyond hypocrisy it’s not worth mentioning. THEY HAVE NO SHAME about using Planned Parenthood for services when they’ve been out front protesting, and go back there afterwards. I’m not making this up.

We’ve reached the point where there is no longer any delusion about how broken our political system is, and how there is NO COMPARISON between the two major political parties. One group would like to see every human being doing at least ok. The other wants only whyte men in power. Both see this as the most effective way to support capitalism.

I don’t give a flying F how we got here, we need to move forward.

For me, because I can’t quite advocate burning it all down, it’s about voting for the party that — as ineffective and effed up as it is — is not actively trying to undermine huge parts of the population. Capitalism is a dead-end, but we need to shore up the crumbling structure of democracy before we can address that wound. There is no longer a “pick your battles” — this has condensed into a single, directed, fight for human rights. For freedom from authoritarianism and fascism.

If we don’t vote for freedom now, we will lose the right to vote at all. First the PoC, then those lacking money, then . . . ANYONE losing their rights is an erosion of all of our rights.

Let me be super clear, for those in the back who can’t hear me shouting:
— if you don’t want to vote Democrat because they have been in favor of vaccine mandates
— if you don’t want to vote Democrat because they didn’t support the Progressive agenda
— if you think being trans is a fantasy (or sickness)
— if you think only AFAB and AMAB can be married
— if you think how a person looks defines their abilities/ attitudes
— if you think any group of humans are above the law
— if you think unions are a bad idea
— if you think it’s not worth it to vote

. . . you are effectively voting for the party who wants women and minorities to shut up and accept their (Christian)God-appointed place as subservient to whyte, cis, men. Moreover, you think you know what defines human and have decided what part of the population isn’t.

The Republicans consistently win on their playbook because they are willing to make Faustian, back-stabbing deals to remain in power; they all benefit in the long run because they take a little hit in the moment. The Democrats consistently lose because their voter base has such high morals they want it all, right now, and refuse to play (vote) when they don’t get it.