Make America What Again?

What with the shit-show we’ve got going on right now as a nation — concentration camps on the border, a wag-the-dog escalation to a war of choice with Iran, a serious bump in hate crimes and people identifying as Nazis and white supremacists, a climate crisis that will destroy life as we know it starting to kick in for real, a nationwide election coming up that will undoubtedly be fucked with by hostile foreign actors while the beneficiaries insist nothing’s wrong, and a legislature unable, thanks to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to do anything but confirm hardcore conservative federal judges to lifetime sinecures, just to skim the surface — it’s easy to understand the widespread longing to go back to the way things were under the Obama Administration. To get things back to normal so we can all go back to living our lives without having to worry that the demented narcissist with the nuclear football will bring about Armageddon in a fit of pique or even just to avoid jail time.

I get it. I really do. I also would like not to live my life in a fog of existential dread, in which every action is pointless because, Rapture or not, the end is probably nigh for the American experiment and possibly human civilization and what can possibly matter anymore?

But even were it possible to return to whatever passed for normal before — and it isn’t — such a return is not even desirable, both on its own merits and especially in light of the challenges we face as Americans and human beings who live on the rapidly-warming, ecologically-imbalanced, and soon-to-be-downwardly-spiraling Earth.

I’ll explain.

Continue reading “Make America What Again?” →

A Modest Proposal Regarding Abortion

Encouraged by the elevation of conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, pro-birth zealots in Ohio and Georgia have introduced anti-choice legislation so draconian that it attempts to criminalize feminine contraception and even assert jurisdiction outside the boundaries of the states in question. Indeed the laws go so far as to mandate a medical procedure (reimplantation of ectopic pregnancies) that does not currently exist, and to criminalize the heartbreaking but naturally-occurring phenonmenon of miscarriage, on the off-chance the mother had some hand in it and it wasn’t just God’s will.

It’s a long way to go to prevent abortions, but I think we have to ask ourselves something.

Does it go far enough?

After all, as severe as these laws are, they ignore a full half of the problem: whether the act of conception was consensual or not, it takes a man to get a woman pregnant. Moreover, thanks to advances in medical technology, it’s both easier and more practicable to concentrate on the male half of the conceptive equation. Vasectomies are simple, painless, and reversible. There is even a non-invasive procedure which coats the inside of the tubes between testes and penis with a magnetized layer such that sperm are pulled apart and rendered unviable as they pass through, without any further effect on the patient. It’s cheap, easy, and can be reversed in a matter of minutes.

Just think how many unintended pregnancies could be prevented. Maybe not all of them, but a significant majority, I’d bet.

Is it draconian to mandate the procedure? Possibly, but no more so than the legislation already on the table. And in preventing the possibility of conception rather than using the demand said conception be carried to term no matter the circumstance or mother’s preference, it will be vastly more effective at our stated goal of preventing abortions.

In fact, I’ll go further, and suggest that not only should some such procedure be mandatory, it should only be reversible by approval, either by a body of women designated to appraise a man’s fitness for reproduction, or by a woman signing off that she actively wants to have that man’s baby.

Will this prevent all unintended pregnancies? No. But it will reduce them significantly. And, as a follow-on result, it will reduce abortions even more significantly, since the only intended pregnancies that end in abortion come about because of some heartbreaking medical necessity, an issue best left to the woman whose body it is and the doctor whose advice she chooses to take.

It is an imperfect solution to the problem of unintended pregnancy, and the choice to abort that sometimes results. And while I am steadfast in my support for a woman’s right to exercise bodily autonomy, and will ever be thus, I do join my anti-choice fellow citizens in hoping to reduce the number of abortions. I know from experience that it’s never an easy decision, nor one ever taken lightly. It seems best to me to see if we can’t prevent it from coming up in the first place.

There’s No Normal to Go Back To: A Quick Note on Evaluating the Democratic Presidential Candidates

So, I have my preferences, loosely held at the moment, because it’s too early to get all worked up and the infighting/circular firing squad thing we went through last time (and how many other times before that?) just isn’t gonna work for us this time, so I’m saving my shots for the other side, who far more richly deserve them. That said, I do have a thing I want to say about how I’m going to be making my choices, donations, and decisions about whom to support in the 2020 election cycle. And though I shan’t tell you, a presumably grown-ass adult human capable of making your own choices, what to think or how to come to your own conclusions, I do hope you’ll give this a read and a good long think, afterwards.

We are at war, and have been for a long time. Decades, at very least.

No, I’m not talking about Afghanistan, or any of the other various and sundry American military deployments abroad, however hot or cold their current theater of operations is. Not that that’s not worth talking about, especially Afghanistan where we’re almost two decades in and I still don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish. No, the war I’m talking about is the war here at home, between left and right, and it’s a war only one side has been fighting for most of the time it’s been going on.

That has to change. Like, yesterday.

Look, I get that you may not think of it that way, and you probably don’t want to think of it that way. It’s comforting to think of the Trump era as an aberration, a Black Swan event that, while it’s doing some damage to our republic, our cultural and institutional immune system is even now spinning up antibodies (Congressional investigations, various state AGs, the Mueller report, etc) to combat it. Once the fever breaks, we can go back to normal, with good-faith bipartisanship and West Wing-style governance by whoever makes the best argument.

We can’t. Continue reading “There’s No Normal to Go Back To: A Quick Note on Evaluating the Democratic Presidential Candidates” →

No Safe Space for Them

Thinking about Ijeoma Oluo’s Medium piece and something my friend said last night on Facebook, about things we on the left can do outside of (the still absolutely vital and necessary work of) GOTV in November and beyond. I’m thinking also about GOP Senators and White House officials being confronted in elevators and hounded out of restaurants, and how much news it makes and how much it seems to rattle them when the effects of their actions are brought home.

And, you know, it makes sense. These are people who are used to the world being their safe space. That’s why they always piss and moan about civility when backlash from their day job spills over into their personal time. That’s how they can do what they do – it doesn’t touch them, most of the time. And when it does, oh how mightily they whine.

So I think we should keep doing stuff like that, because it’s clearly working. I am not, to be clear, advocating violence, even if I can sympathize with the temptation.

But turnabout is fair play, and seeing how their policies and political goals create a general atmosphere of threat and uncertainty for everyone not like them, I think it’s only fair they should get a taste of that in their own lives.

Will it change their minds, or policies? Who knows? Probably not. But it’s time those policies start costing them the way they cost so many other people.