I do what I always do when I need to renew myself - I went to the water.
My soul felt the weight of the U.S. Supreme Court Decision to Overturn Roe V. Wade. She felt it in ways I hadn't expected.
Age and menopause has me well past the age of this impacting me.
But my daughters are just beginning their life.
At ages twenty and eighteen, respectively, their rights to themselves were wiped away by justices who lied under oath, one who has always tried to destroy freedoms for Black people, and a handmaid.
Both of them will be in college in states that say a woman has no rights. Those same states where human beings were chattel and in another life, their wombs would have been used for commodity.
I felt the enormity of what happened.
And as I mentioned during our times of Joys and Concerns at church on Sunday, if white women were just now concerned, they were not paying attention. This was never really about Roe. Roe was just the way to get the evangelical christians on board with the evil schemes of white men in power.
Call a thing a thing.
So I did.
I did after I spent Saturday in the bed.
Something about we Empaths feeling and absorbing all the energy around us, from deep anger and sadness, and my body could no longer gain the strength to go out.
So I rested.
Sometimes, we have to rest so we can calm our spirits and think of what to do next.
The day before the decision, I had been at the opera, The Parable of the Sower, an experience conceived and directed by the brilliant Toshi Reagon. Like Octavia Butler's 1993 book Toshi's folk song and commentary were prophetic.
What will we do?
How will we be in relationship with each other?
We do not have to just sit back and take the numbing anesthesia of placated religion to soothe the masses. That is what dulled the senses and critical thinking of so many since 1980 when the Moral Majority emerged on the scene. Right along with cable news and a non-stop drumbeat of fear.
Well here we are.
What we feared has come to pass.
Freedoms of the last fifty years are being eroded away.
Roe was just the first.
Resist.Resist.Organize.Strategize.
That was the mantra of the opera
We do not have to quietly accept this.
So while I have some disdain for the finally-waking-up-white-women, I can at least appreciate that they somewhat got it. That their whiteness was not going to save them this time. That it was not just what they were doing to those people over there.
It has come knocking at their door.
Slowly and methodically this evil has grown and pecked away at the life we hoped would be.
They distracted folks with attacks on The 1619 Project and bused in schoolmarm protests about masks, all the while, legislating their way into a woman's body parts.
Of course, not all who can give birth are women - I'm not not with that news - but only those with a vagina-uterus-fallopian tubes-and ovaries had their rights taken away. Transwomen may identify as women, but with male genitalia and internal body parts, they will never know the terror of an unwanted or unplanned seed brewing inside them. They will never know the dashed hopes and dreams that were shattered when those two lines came up at a time when one did not want that to happen.
They are the enemy who came to steal, kill, and destroy.
But their marketing game was strong.
They twisted around a few ancient lines to tell these women that their only way to heaven was succumbing to the whims of a pen&$.
1998 scared them.
When the pre-2000 census indicated more Black and Brown people would be in this country than White, that it was way off in the far away future of 2050.
Until 2007 happened when more Black and Brown, mostly Brown babies were born than white.
Until 2008 when a Black man became President.
Until 2014 when Black people took to the streets after three lynchings of Black boys under legal age.
So they responded.
2000 was a stolen election - U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore.
2001 was a fabricated war on terror to replace the war on drugs
2003 was a market crash
2008 was a housing crash
2008-2016 they obstructed every move
2013 they killed an innocent child in three seconds
2014 they killed a recent high school graduate and left his body to bake in the hot sun
2016 they elected a megalomaniac
2016-2020 they put a rapingdrunkblubbering idiot and a couple lying folks on the bench
2020 they lynched a Black man in the middle of a pandemic
2020 they put a handmaid on the court in the 11th hour
2021 they stormed the Capitol in an insurrection
2022 they took away bodily autonomy
All their actions have been about power and control.
White men in power and white women who benefit from it.
The world came crashing down.
Some of us already knew it was coming and said so as far back as 2008 when we tried to implore folks to do something.
Now we were here and the monsters are beyond the gate, they are in the most private parts.
They want to be able to rape little girls again, they way they did during enslavement.
They are sick.
But we do not have to quietly sit back and take it.
When I gave the benediction at church on Sunday, I asked them to look at their hands. It was a church of mostly Boomer white folks who consider themselves liberal.
They have money and resources.
Stop being complicit and silent.
Stop being afraid of their country club set.
Stop being instruments of terror.
Do something,
That is what I implored them as I asked them to look at their hands, that there was something they could do.
It did not have to come to this and now that it is here and the world has crashed at our feet, we have to sift through the rubble and try to find life again.
Some states are sanctuaries.
Some homes are sanctuaries.
Some healers are sanctuaries.
There is a way through this terror.
But we must be brave and go together.
The only constant is change and what we knew has changed drastically.
So we must change.
Wake up from our collective slumber and assumption about the good of man.
They have shown us who they are.
Resist.Resist.Organize.Strategize.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thoughtful dialogue is appreciated.