As we emerge weakened from another weekend, as a people, as a country, you feel the weight of it draped on you again, right?
The world weariness, this film of exhausted depression from fighting all these daily fights that stretch endlessly from an American woman's womb now all the way to Ukraine?
Open your eyes in the morning if you could sleep, turn on any television, and here is a PARTIAL list of what you see under attack:
The Earth is under attack, from flooding to fire.
Freedom is under attack.
Democracy is under attack.
Decency is under attack.
Women are under attack.
Blacks are under attack.
Immigrants.
Exiles.
Jews, Asians, Muslims.
The poor.
Gays are under attack.
Lesbians.
Bisexuals.
The transgender.
The questioning are under attack.
Anything or anyone who can be framed as The Other to further foment fear is under attack.
Our kids are under attack.
Our mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters, daughters.
The things we love.
And the things we need.
Your bank account.
Your gas tank.
Your rent.
Your oceans.
Your farms.
Your futures.
Your free speech is under attack.
Fair elections.
Facts.
The free press.
The Constitution.
The Capitol building is under attack.
We, The People, are under attack.
Whatever you thought and dreamed this country was or could be is under attack.
And you know what gets buried and lost under all that, right?
Your peace.
And your power.
This is impossible to miss, as we march in the streets, as we can’t stop fighting each other, as everything becomes about the distraction techniques in politics, and America looks a little dumber and more embarrassing by the day:
NONE of us seem to be living in the country we thought we were living in. ALL of us, Republicans or Democrats and everyone else, feel threatened. Even those in power. The feeling of being threatened is somehow both the reason that we all fight ... and one of the few things we all have in common.
But this isn't about Republicans and Democrats. Or, rather, if it is about Republicans, then it must also be about Democrats. Americans have one million options on coffee flavors and water, but only two real political parties, so we get the leadership we deserve, or lack thereof, Republicans so very ruthless about winning the dirtiest fights, Democrats so very weak in losing them.
The Democrats could have put Roe into law numerous times but instead decided to fundraise off it. That's one of the dirtiest secrets here, that the government and media are almost entirely choked and controlled by big money. The laughing billionaires rocket their toys toward space without paying taxes and watch from above as the rest of us do what desperate animals do in a confined environment. We have begun eating each other.
This is how you erode principles with the metronomic consistency of waves upon a shore. Make the daily fight so hard in so many ways and places that you get too tired and distracted and helpless and hopeless to even get to the up in uprising.
It is exhausting, fights on all these fronts, but exhausting you is part of the gameplan. It's a technique used in torture. Fatigue makes cowards of us all, but the power does not ever tire of throwing these fights your way, weakening your appetite and strength for them. The more you cry for equality, the more the power gets more annoyed by the cry than the inequality.
Women didn't help write our rights. They didn't get the right to vote until more than 12 decades later. And so you've seen the legal reaction to the move toward progress, empowerment and equality for them. Against the will of the citizens in a voting democracy, #MeToo just got sent the hell back to 1972.
So now the unborn are more protected than they were. The born, not so much. Congratulations, America. The fetus is now safer in the womb than it is five years later, when it can be sent off to school and slaughtered.
The latest appalling indignity is that the Republican Party, as Donald Trump once said on tape at the start of his 10,000 Watergates, has grabbed American women by the pussy.
By law of our land, against the will of the voting people, an American woman now has less agency over her body, life and future than her government ... and then she did four decades ago. In this regard, in limiting a woman's reproductive freedom, The Land Of The Free is now Russia, Iran, North Korea. We are our enemies. We are THE enemy.
Set us back half a century and tucked it inside the Bible, where too much hate gets hidden. I don't think I'll ever forget pepper spraying a protesting crowd outside the White House for Donald Trump to have his photo op awkwardly holding the Bible as if he had never before held the book, or any book.
Such a particularly evil disguise, this one, grabbing at religion and the law and pretending its about pre-natal protection of the fetus instead of the power. As if leathery demon fossil Mitch McConnell cares about the Bible as anything other than a political weapon that bludgeons anything that threatens his establishment, his rules, his power, his version of We, The People, that was written by only his version of people. Power is his God, but, Jesus, your powerlessness feeds his unHoly Spirit.
When gun laws and abortion laws become ingredients in another fight filled with fear, you can feel freedom groan under that weight as we watch history re-written so that what governs us morphs not so slowly from We, The People, to We, The Politicians. And then the police become state militia, as you were reminded this weekend in all the videos of abortion protestors being dragged face-over-asphalt away from the peaceful part of the fight.
A pandemic taught us that people are even more selfish than we thought, so it would make sense that the most powerful in politics, the people chosen by us, the people we've given power, would in turn be our representatives in that regard, the most selfish among us, and that we'd now get dragged marching as a country toward living in A Handmaid's Tale.
It was always one of the most grotesque tools in the Trump toolbox, to flood your timeline with so much scandal that you couldn't even keep up, leaving you numb to it and him somehow more immune to it, shamelessness a magic carpet that now allows politicians to rise above their own misdeeds instead of being crippled by them. You can't feel disgrace if you eliminate any and all of the grace.
The White House is America's most valuable home, 132 rooms, 18 acres, valued at over $400 million. We gave it to him. And he not only ransacked it for all its valuables but, while you were yelling about him urinating on the constitution in the Oval Office, he was already shitting on the carpet in the library. And the party has tolerated it, has tolerated an insurrection, as the Supreme Court turns into a policy arm instead of a judicial branch.
Trump's most echoing victory is that he got the judges. You control the law, you control the punishments. You control the punishments, you control the people. You control the people, you control the power.
It is not a coincidence that he came to be as a violent reaction to a black man in what has always been the White House.
Historically, by sea-to-shining-sea law, the white man has always been by far the LEAST under attack because, of course, he is the one who designed the system and the rules.
But he feels very much under attack now, doesn't he?
Because of the tired cries of minorities demanding decency and equality.
And this is the result when the ones who make the rules feel threatened by the people beneath them being ruled.
Our basic human rights ... become our country's basic human wrongs.
Everything All At Once