On my mind lately is I think back to 2022 and the midterms and special elections and how I got wrapped up in false hope. Even while I was scribbling down in my one line a day journal about the smell of theocratic fascism on the rise a year prior before leak of Roe to be overturned, I was hoping there was fight somewhere that it couldn't just be me. So those things/events led me to believe something bigger was happening that was more powerful and stronger than these forces, that as a collective who cared we could feel it in the air, and we were inching closer at any moment... Yet in the end I've come to think of those events as red herrings. Not distractions in that they didn't matter the elections and amendments, but that it was not a true and complete picture. The bills and dismantling of reproductive and LGBTQ rights that were in so many states, and the book bans, that so much of this occurred with that barely any true fight or civl disobedience push back was the real tell. I feel really bad I fooled myself. I feel really bad at what did not occur. I feel really angry at the young women who just ignored it all.
I feel bad I wanted to believe some men cared enough about their loved ones not being sanctioned to state torture and mass government control. Men just don't care in large numbers about women nor themselves, their feelings are all that matter to many of them and a cobbled pod of people they can barely open up to, they claim to love yet have such a tiring slog in expressing this in healthy, steady, and reliable ways (*). I feel betrayed by middle age and older white women, and those are the white women who vote most out of all. I feel a big fuck you to the Gen X and Boomer women whose time has passed for that ability and they fucked other women. Some of you are no better than the men in the man vs. bear scenario at the moral center. Your daughters, granddaughters, nieces, cousins, girls as your neighbors, students, as your patients. etc., you fucked them over. I hope it haunts you but it won’t. A lot of older white women are captured into individualism they feel little larger care of others in the world, they mimic patriarchy in this way. They enjoy patriarchy in this way. Them against the world. 'Not my problem. (*)'
I also resent the reproductive rights movement for not preparing for this at all, even though they have openly written as if it was a good thing they had the foresight to see this years ahead of time back in 2022, and it’s like well what was your plan? To beat a drum, recite comedy, read a poem and honk at fake pregnancy clinics? Shame anyone demonstrating with more outrage? You abandoned the streets. You did. Shame on you.
On another angle outside of the movement in moments misread and looking back in hindsight, I recall political commentators and critics that ‘oh now the Republicans have caught the car and it looks like there is a big price they won’t be able to afford.’ But too many couldn’t organize nor see the larger picture or feel or care about the danger top to bottom, seasoned to amateur citizens…So many gun to the face mistakes over the past ten years that makes me want to kick down a house.
* (*) recent
Yet I wrote almost all of that above a couple weeks ago before these protests against the gestapo been going on. It's hard to find a concentrated energy in this moment however for me, that doesn't feel it will eventually be a forgotten deflated ballon. I am moved and supportive but I rarely feel inspired. I went to a Palestine event which I enjoyed and I felt less alone, but once you leave it's difficult to keep that social energy up when you don't know anyone. We all are pulling at threads throughout our lives hoping we can find the right "way." But the fear of nothing there and the years of realizing nothing was actually there, no matter how hard I pulled or dreamed, puts in me in a position where the desire to tug a thread is not so enticing. And yet what is all this bitching and self pitying from myself when so much suffering is happening, people disappeared, family torn from one another, police beating the shit out of people as usual, people taking rubber bullets, a boat seized that was carrying humanitarian aid. Seized by the ethnostate guardians of the supposed best and most moral army in the world. I hope I find my people, I miss that tribe once upon a time. But I must remind myself the self pitying, no one is going to be drawn to that. I watched a Maya Angelou video recently and will badly paraphrase how it has struck and stuck with me, she said you should carry yourself in the world the way people who carried and lifted you up throughout your life. Bring that with you.
