Roe v. Wade

1973 is one of those miraculous coincidence years in history when an entirely new order begins. It's the year of Roe v. Wade, thr landmark year of women's liberation. The Vietnam War began its true drawdown, which set a basic moratorium on offensive Cold War action, and the year Chile deposed its Marxist president Allende - US help in this coup was never proven but... come on... the Chilean coup set a new reliance on covert Cold War action. Simultaneously It's the year Watergate broke, which set a new standard for government transparency. It was the year of the Yom Kippur War, which set the US on a till now permanent alliamce with Israel, and as a result caused the Arab Oil boycott, which made US consumers demand smaller cars and sealed the decline of US manufacturing.

A new order was set in American life. Some call it neoliberal, I'd call it libertarian. For nearly 50 years we've had a laissez faire approach to morality itself. Don't want to pay taxes? Let's lower them. Don't want to fight wars? Don't serve. Don't like abortions? Don't get one. And for all the bristling, that social compact held for nearly 50 years.

But in the beginning of everything is the end. And the end is that eventually, we would tire of tolerating each other's differences, and when it truly happens, there's no turning back the clock. Once Trump was elected, the red line was crossed, and every disaster since has in some ways been foreordained. If it wasn't coronavirus, it would have soon been something else.

What brought us all here is the internet, which throws our moral disagreements into each others' faces every day and forces us to confront the fact that a hundred million Americans believe things we believe to be evil, and our hundred million believe things they believe evil. Issues 80% of the population used to think were priority 100 are now priority 1, beyond even their personal well-being, and soon enough, may seem like issues of life and death.

Whatever the new order is, the old order is dead, and the death is fucking painful.

Legal abortion is not a negotiation, and not just a right because of issues of women's bodily autonomy. It's a right because every statistical metric shows that a society without legal abortion is a worse society.

What Republicans term family values are an impossible standard of human behavior. In states where abortion is widely discouraged, there are more single parent families, larger percentage of families on welfare, and more domestic abuse. Don't believe it? Look it up anywhere but the right wing propagandasphere. Family values prevent the very values they promote.

And if that's not enough, around 1995 there was a very steep drop in US crime. Why? Well, part of it might have been extreme policing, but there are plenty of extremely policed areas where high crime happens anyway. It's nearly as likely that the reason was that the Roe v Wade generation came to adulthood around then, and there were less people with no life options.

The world already has far to many people to provide for. A society without abortion is a luxury Christians cannot afford. It will probably kill far more lives than it saves. Where is their mercy? Where is their charity?

My generation, that weird 'Simpsons generation' between gen-X and millenials, became adolescents when the Republican party officially dropped crazy to the point of no return. The last few years we have now seen the evil ugliness fully reveal itself that fermented our entire lifetimes and blindsided our Boomer parents who centerized after college.

We may think that the Republican party was always this evil, but they weren't. Before 1990 we were a planet on the verge of nuclear annihilation and whatever caveats previous liberals might have had with Cold War policies of Nixon and Reagan, Republicans were at least responding rationally to existential threats even if perhaps incorrectly.

Not anymore. They are now the existential threat. They are now the Soviet Union. And whatever issues I have with people to my left, they are for the moment still very small compared to conservative delusions. The planet is about to endanger billions, and they're trying to eliminate the easiest way to minimize the population?

The new American order is a cold civil war that's perpetually on the verge of becoming hot. The best way to prevent it from becoming hot is to act now, not later, before they screw us up into war with China and China bombs the cities where liberals live. It's probably time to start driving pregnant teens over state lines as an organized practice, forming human shieds around abortion clinics, and loudly picketing churches the same way abortion clinics and planned parenthood branches are. Resistance now will save us violent defense later when more and more conservatives realize that intimidation at the barrel of a gun gets them exactly what they want.

I don't usually think much of street resistance, but now we're here, and this is the moment we have to take the next step before they realize that they pay no price for taking a next step.