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Sunday, May 19, 2019

Clarity

If you find yourself in opposition to the ridonkulously regressive anti-choice bills being shoveled forth throughout Real 'murka, you owe them a huge thanks:  they are clarifying things wonderfully, removing any possible doubts from the well, the establishment Republicons won't let the extra-chromosome crowd kill Roe hack argument. They will. They are. Wishful interpretations of their supposed intentions aren't going to help anyone.

This should not be framed as the typical "pro-life/pro-choice" dilemma. The argument is simple:  either you think women and teenaged girls should be thrown in prison for decades at a time for making their own health care decisions, or you don't. Some inbred, doddering creep who has no clue how women's bodies work, or how basic reproduction and gestation take place, decided that miscarriages should be investigated and treated as homicides. Either you trust those imbeciles, or you don't. There is no longer any middle ground to pretend to defend.

It's interesting how none of these bills address the male's role at all in any of these pregnancies or precious heartbeats. It's even more interesting how so many of the bills have been "crafted" by individuals with literally no idea how women's bodies work, or how medical science works, or how pregnancies work. You can't re-implant an ectopic pregnancy. Women do not know they're pregnant the instant after the male ejaculates in them, nor can they test at that point. And so on. These people aren't just fanatics, they appear to be borderline retarded as well.

And while it's true that this all predates Trump by decades, this is still his baby (so to speak). He's the one who put a couple of middle-aged conservative Roman Catholics on the Supreme Court to decide Roe's eventual fate, when it makes it back there for the overturn in a year or so. He's the one who's been prancing around the country with his fanciful stories about newborns being "executed" because they had the bad luck to be born to murderous parents with serial-killer doctors working out of butcher-shop hospitals. He's stoked the nonsense with pure lies, and these bills are the natural results.

So everyone who is horrified by this, but just couldn't get "enthused" enough to vote for Butter Emails, you own this. It's yours. You did this with your purity-pony bullshit, or because you're too lazy to vote in the midterms, or for state legislature candidates, allowing them to be gummed up with these batshit god-bothering squids. How do you like it?

Don't bother getting outraged. Everyone's outraged about something or other. Your primal scream is a drop in an endless, bottomless ocean of tears and plaints, some worthy, some useless. But none stand out anymore. No one cares.

Now comes the usual spate of red-state women talking about their upcoming door-to-door campaigns, registering voters, maybe a protest, blah blah blah. Look, good luck with that, but if you're still having to knock on doors like a fucking Jehovah's Witless, trying to bring the good news to the heedless, lazy morons, maybe that's the fucking problem. And if you think your Handmaid's Tale cosplay on the capital steps of this or that yokel state is going to change a single mind, you've lost yours.

Don't bother with that useless bullshit, and don't wait for Election Day 2020. How much more do you think can go sideways in the next eighteen months, anyway? People still thinking they have the luxury of time is maybe the most interesting delusion of all, especially since it's unnecessary.

Every day you're awake and every consumer choice you make constitutes a vote. You vote every damned day, with your voice and your wallet. So start by not participating in any consumer choices from any of those states. Georgia has spent years branding itself as the Hollywood of the south. Here are a couple of partial lists of movies and teevee shows produced at least in part in that state. Ron Howard is moving forward with making his film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy in that state. Take five minutes and explain to Potsie why you'll be avoiding his bullshit movie like the fucking plague. I like Archer and Stranger Things as much as the next person, but I have zero problem never watching those shows again, and knocking off a quick email to the production companies letting them know exactly why.

Toyota and Mercedes are among the auto manufacturers with plants in Georgia and Alabama. Tell them why you won't be purchasing their products. Sports teams as well. You think a boycott of Alabama college football wouldn't hurt that state? Nick Saban is the highest-paid public employee in the nation by far. The highest-paid public employee in the overwhelming majority of states is a college football or basketball coach.

The NCAA is a slave system anyway, making unholy amounts of profit from the broken bodies of marginally literate kids who all think they're going to grab the brass ring, and thus have no backup plan or marketable skills when their knee blows out or they've sustained one too many concussions. Talk about a wretched hive of scum and villainy. But I promise you, if enough people harangue the networks who broadcast the games and the companies who buy ad space, they'll have to listen.

Yes, it requires work and effort, and puts one in the annoying position of being a self-righteous entertainment hall monitor. I guess people will have to decide for themselves whether it's a bigger annoyance than multiple states in 2019 America declaring that a teenaged girl who's been forcibly impregnated by her stepfather should then be forced to bear that demon seed, under threat of decades of imprisonment.

I mean, I'm a middle-aged, married white guy in California, with no friends or relatives in any of those states so far -- I don't have any personal concerns about these bills at all -- and it's still entirely unacceptable to me. It's not a tough choice in the least. I don't care if every state is "purple" or whatever. I don't care that Ron Howard and his crew are probably politically "moderate" or "liberal". I don't want a fucking dime of my money going to anything that might remotely support so much as a hot-dog cart in these goddamned places. We can't control where our tax dollars go, but we sure as hell can decide where our tourism and entertainment dollars get spent.

Frankly, we should have boycotted the Super Bowl and Mercedes (who sponsors the Atlanta Falcons stadium where the game was played this year) after the Georgia midterms last year, when Brian Kemp openly made sure that those people couldn't vote.

These fucking animals should have been ended decades ago. This is everyone's chance to vote for sanity, to declare that they've had enough of the inmates running the asylum, once and for all. Now is the time to do it, and you don't have to commit a violent act, or even leave the comfort of your couch. At most it takes a bit of googling, maybe create a couple of email templates for future use.

Best of all, it will work if enough people do it. Money is the oxygen of this vile system. Someone is bankrolling these motherless fucks. If enough people band together and deprive them of that oxygen, they will die. You do not have to take shit from these people. These are states that are heavily reliant on tourism and some manufacturing, two of the easiest things to inflict pain with a boycott. It's the one vote they can't suppress, can't pretend they lost the power cord to the machine, or pretend that your registration card has an incorrect middle initial.

So let's do this thing already. Take an afternoon and make a list of products and companies. Create a hashtag and circulate it online to get people on the same page. Spread the word. Send a few emails.

And, you know, maybe for the folks out there in these states, who hate the policies and the legislators who come up with them, maybe it's time to leave, if you really feel the situation is that urgent. Staying and voting isn't doing any good, right? So maybe it's time to go. People get precious about a place, because their family has been there for x generations or whatever. But in the end, it's just a place, defined by the people in it.

When enough of those people have become fucking awful and insane, and your well-meaning plaints aren't talking them out of their tree, maybe it's time to go. Easier said than done, I know. But it's also easier than staying in an area that is wide-open about its collective intent to implement horrifically violent policies on the poor and innocent, hoping in futility that it will someday change.

The policies and politicians reflect the desires of a plurality of the constituents, period. You can make all the snide japes about the gender or race composition of the Alabama State Legislature, but they're there because enough of the citizens of that state want them there. Awful politicians are a product of awful citizens who believe in awful things and vote for them. Maybe it's time to leave them to wallow in their awfulness. There are plenty of places that aren't awful.

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