Where I Stand

Afterwar

The news that the Supreme Court will gut Roe vs. Wade dropped yesterday evening. Sure, it’s “just a draft opinion.” But it’s what rancid, racist, power-hungry sociopaths have been working toward for decades. According to these misogynistic fuckheads, a woman has less right to her own living body than a corpse to its dead organs. Forced birth is violence, it has always been violence, and now in America it will be state violence once again. It’s a marriage of fascism and racism ending in Lebensborn camps. Safe abortions will be outlawed, and people will bleed to agonizing death after suffering backalley ones. Rich white women will still be able to get theirs–for a time.

Only for a time.

And if you’re about to bloviate about the rights of a fetus, read your fucking history. White American evangelicals didn’t have a problem with abortion until the Civil Rights Act. In other words, it’s about the racism, stupid, with the added fillip of forcing pain and degradation onto women. A neat little package, huh?

Do I sound upset? You bet your bippy. If you think it’s okay, or even faintly morally right, to force women to endure pregnancy against their will, then fuck off. There’s the door. Get thee gone, go with your hateful little gods, I will not miss you one iota. Don’t read my work, don’t buy my books, don’t put my name in your goddamn lying, racist, fascist mouth. This is all of a piece. The racism, the anti-trans bigotry, the misogyny, the “right” to breathe disease over everyone else because you “don’t want” to wear a scrap of cloth over your facial contagion-holes–it’s all the same. The Venn diagram of all these things is a perfect circle.

We know what–and who–these people are, and what they stand for. If you choose to join yourself to them in unholy political or social matrimony, you are no friend or reader of mine. My friends–and dear Readers–are better than that.

I want that exceedingly clear, so I am saying it publicly here. I want there to be zero ambiguity or confusion about where I stand, where I have always stood. And I’ll say one more thing, too: We told you so.

We fucking told you so. I have been screaming my head off about this for decades. I even wrote a whole goddamn book about where this fuckery will take us, I warned you the best way I know how, and I was ignored. So were civil rights activists, queer activists, and pro-choice activists. We were ignored because serving the racism and misogyny of powerful (white) men in the hopes of getting a few crumbs off the table–or a few chances to be violent, vile, and abusive without consequence–was, and is, profitable.

I am furious, and hopeless. I don’t see this stopping, or ending well. It’s an unending cavalcade of blood and brutality, the Party’s boot on a human face forever and ever. Studying history means watching the hateful and powerful repeat it over and over, while screaming yourself hoarse in warning and receiving nothing but a fist to the gut for one’s pains. And the people we voted in during 2020’s long hideous fight are sitting idly by, watching it happen. They won’t even put a treasonous orange fascist felon and his violently traitorous coevals in prison where they belong. All they can do, apparently, is wring their hands and talk about “bipartisanship” while collecting lobbyist money and political perks.

The long arc of history might bend toward justice, but that is no comfort to me right now. All I feel is despair. No wonder I can’t settle to work. The world is burning, and the water has been stolen by rich racist fascists who own media empires. Why should I bother telling stories? Why should I bother with anything?

Intellectually I know the work is important even if it only provides temporary escape for those groaning under the lash. But oh, my heart hurts, and a writer’s responsibility to never look away means I am glued to the chair, my eyelids held open, and forced to watch. I am so tired, and so hopeless right now, and the battering continues.

I’m going to go have breakfast, and walk the dogs. At least they listen. (Well, some of the time.) And at least they aren’t cruel. Cruelty is an entirely human game.

And, apparently, one that pays a few rancid douchebags so well we will all drown in its blood-tainted backwash, while the entire planet fries.