I often say that “I’m so far left, I’m right.”
I say that no one wants an abortion and that I’d like to see that no one needs one. That’s only one word away from what my right-leaning friends say. They might say that they “would like to see that no one gets one”. And there we diverge.
I’m an old school feminist, we wanted child care, equal pay, health care, and choice for women. What we got was abortion, not child care or equal pay. So now it seems we are fighting for something no one really wants but some people need.
Women don’t want abortion, they want lives that let them fully participate with or without children or the threat of unwanted pregnancy.
Abortion is an interesting situation for people. We're trying to support the right to something that no one really wants to need to do. And that people don't want to have to talk about afterward. Sometime back in time we lost the narrative on reproductive rights and alternatives in favor of the narrative on the right to have an abortion.
So we don't get to have the argument about how our economic system, health care system, racism, sexism and culture make abortion the narrative focus while we haven't moved the narrative to these other rights.
We haven't yet even given women and some other humans full human rights. So we're still in a situation where ancient values favoring men are determining the narrative. We are having the conversation about choice with one arm held behind our backs. On both the pro-choice side and the other side.
Women are being asked to make these difficult decisions without being given equal pay for equal work.
Women are being asked to make these difficult decisions while men are not being held accountable for not respecting women's rights to their bodies.
Women are being asked to make these difficult decisions while they are not being given equal access to religious leadership where they can seek discernment.
Men are engaging in these conversations when they often don't hold a full view of women's moral and intellectual equality.
Men are engaging in these issues when they often don't have the maturity to talk about menstrual blood, tampons, interrupting their ejaculations, determining alternative methods of sexual gratification and women's genitals and reproductive systems.
We're having this conversation without equality or talking about equality.
Can we stop focusing on the right to have an abortion and talk about the circumstances in our society and economy that make abortion a pragmatic choice and a health necessity?
My experience with people running for office in Louisiana is that they either (on the left) don’t want to talk about it. Or (on the right) don’t feel they will get any support for child care, health care or equal pay. And if they support these things out loud they lose voters for small and diverse reasons.
It’s not that they are against those things, they just can’t run on them.
I have compassion for them. It must be hard to not be able to express yourself fully.
And I have that experience too. If I fully express my thoughts, my liberal Facebook “friends” will shut me up in a minute. I’m not supposed to say anything except “Yaay abortion”.
Authoritarianism is winning in the United States even though most right-leaning individuals don’t support overturning Roe v Wade, or banning books or having an authoritarian government.
But the holes in our constitution that are there because it is over 200 hundred years old allow for a minority to influence, through modern technology, what people hear and believe.
And yet, liberals will cling to the idea that that same constitution is perfect for us as it is because it is special and holy to them. Even if they don’t like where our nation is now and where it is heading.
I thought liberalism meant learning, synthesizing information and then making decisions. But I fear that what many really believe is “make it fit into what we already have”.
I’m a nerd, I have a pocket constitution, preamble and bill of rights. I hear from both left and right firm “beliefs” that are simply not in these documents. These beliefs are “common wisdom”, not experiential knowledge based on what they have read and experienced in discussion and debate.
But what is in these documents, because they are practically ancient, gives judges and politicians the ammunition to create a reality that really never was. Even during the time of enslavement documented in the “constitution” enslaved people had varying conditions of freedom, acceptance and power through their expertise needed by colonialists. But their voices and experiences were not recorded at that time.
Now their existence and experience are revealed by historians. Because our past is not that far past. Nothing about our country is black and white. It’s all shades of experience of lifetimes.
Genocide is the “elephant in the room”. Our country was founded on genocide. And it was settled by people wanting to turn a profit. Needing to turn a profit due to the circumstances under which they got their “rights” to the land in the new world they embraced the idea of expansion. We mostly don’t consider that it could have been different. Colonials could have upheld treaties and traded with indigenous people in this new land. But profit was a strong motivation to violate treaties and take land.
We founded a country in which killing and eradicating the other seemed expedient and pragmatic. When enslaved Africans and African-Americans were freed it seemed expedient to re-enslave them with Jim Crow and lynch them if that didn’t work. Or to move them to Liberia so that America didn’t have to include them if they don’t provide labor at the price we wanted.
Our profit motive culture has not changed much. Capitalism still needs an underclass to make it work. Under capitalism there will always need to be places in America where the minimum wage is below other places or corporations will go to other countries where they pay less, provide less and do less for the communities.
There is a term in business schools that many seek to change: excess human capital. What do businesses do with excess human capital? They fire them. After slavery was abolished there was a lot of excess human capital but they couldn’t be easily disposed of. Capitalism in the US has gone through tortuous gyrations to figure out what to do with formerly enslaved people, poor white men, and women who need work to support themselves and their families.
The go-to solution in the United States has been to try to confine them to low-wage jobs and terrible living conditions. But we see uprisings in the capitalist system, because it isn’t entirely a cultural or political system. So our right-leaning constituents try to make this system work for them in any way they can. And left-leaning constituents don’t make waves if they can preserve their edge in the competition for work and wages.
I fear that if no other gyrations work, expedient killings may be on the rise again. Of course with reasoning: they are becoming a majority, they are not really like us, they are destroying our democracy.
Yes, I do fear that many will say that I am reactionary. But I come from a long line of prophet witness. These things are not new. The old testament prophets long tried to tell us when we strayed from the basic teachings: welcome the stranger, support the poor, take up for those who have no voice. And the new testament teachings: Love your neighbor as yourself.
But I fear we don’t love ourselves and so we love our neighbor only in so much as we love ourselves.
And there I have compassion. I had parents who didn’t love themselves and there truly the sins of the fathers (and mothers) have been visited upon their children.
It is a struggle to love yourself. And to love your neighbor, especially if they are different from you.
But it doesn’t have to be a great leap. One can simply not give in to the worst in our nature. You can dislike without hate. You can disagree without annihilating the argument of the other.
A wise man once said that every war comes down to individuals. If individuals choose differently then a fight becomes an argument. An argument becomes a discussion. And a discussion can happen over dinner. And dinner can become a friendship.