July 5 Reflections

 A few reflections on July 4th, which turned out to be a lovely day where we were fortunate to safely celebrate and reconnect with friends and neighbors. We watched the local bike parade and chatted with good friends at the pool, my two older kids lounging with us at their first real "adult swim." In the afternoon, we received terrible news via our phone notifications - information about the violence at a parade outside of Chicago. If I had a flag flying, I would have put it at half mast, but I could not even summon the energy to hang the United States flag this year, though it is my country - our country, too - and I won't give it away.  I found this quote motivational, though I couldn't act on it:

It should not be so unbearably hard for justice to prevail, and justice finally gained should never again be at risk. But this is the country we live in. The fight for freedom will never be over. And, God help me, I will not be one who gives up. This is my country, too, and I will not surrender it to a vocal minority of undemocratic tyrants.

- Margaret Renkl, New York Times, "The American Flag Belongs to Me, Too, and This Year I'm Taking It Back" July 2, 2022

I failed to fly the flag despite Renkl's empowering words, but I will return to them as a rallying cry when I abandon the distraction of pessimism and double down on my own efforts, however small they may be. But it will be a minute. When William asked me pensively what I thought was "truly American," I pled the fifth, not wanting to give him any top-of-mind answers that accrued over the last difficult weeks.

A Loss of Freedoms on this Fourth

 "All rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure."

-Dissenting justices, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Growing up, I never found my place on the ideological battleground between "pro-life" and "pro-choice." Raised Catholic, steeped in the lore of the virgin Mary whose portrait hung on the painted cinderblock walls of classroom where I had weekly religious education, I defined myself as someone who didn't think they would have an abortion (though how can we ever really know?) but would never enforce my opinions or religious principles on another person. 

So I was pro-choice but joined other marches (for immigrant rights, for child safety, for the environment) instead of the pro-choice rallies. I read a few articles about the potential for a conservative court to overturn Roe v. Wade, some of which suggested that women's rights would be safer in the hands of state legislatures, that using a Supreme Court decision as basis for freedoms was dangerous. I even managed to be hopeful that we could turn a prospective overturn to our advantage. I was slightly disengaged; I was optimistic.

I was wrong.

A friend told me yesterday that optimism and pessimism are on a continuum, and at either end of the spectrum they are both merely distractions from reality, which of course lies in the jumbled middle. My attempt at optimism was a flimsy shield against the reality, that women's rights have been rolled back over a half-century, and other rights around the issues of who we love, how we build our families, how we decide for ourselves, are greatly endangered now in the hands of a politicized Supreme Court majority. The conservative justices claim to be originalist, to hearken back to the founders' intentions as expressed through a document that is hundreds of years old, and which was created in a time when men owned their wives and human beings with black skin only "counted" as a fraction of a person. 

Jefferson himself said, "Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind as that becomes more developed. More enlightened, as new discoveries are made. New truths discovered and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances. Institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

In my reading last week I (much too late) became convinced that Roe and the succeeding case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which established the right of women to choose to have an abortion before viability, were attempts by the court to balance the freedoms and right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of both the mother and the unborn. They were compromises, attempting to recognize the delicacy, the emotional complexity, of such an intimate decision. There have always been some restrictions on abortion, and two separate courts levied decisions that bolstered both restrictions and rights. But a half-century of tempered jurisprudence was thrown out in the Dobbs case, when no attempt was made to calculate the right to life and liberty of the mother. All of the rights go to the unborn child.

Abortion could soon be prohibited in half the states in our country. Tens of millions of women will be judged if they miscarry, will face criminal charges (against them and any friends or family who help them) if they seek an abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or dangers to their health. If they have a miscarriage they will be scrutinized, as will their doctors. That is a fact - it is already happening. 

The Supreme Court decided that it was acceptable for states to take away these options for women, to criminalize an act that was enshrined as a right ten days ago. The day before the Dobbs decision, the majority decided it was NOT acceptable for states to limit a citizen's ability to carry a gun - that right is now important enough to be embraced by the court and placed out of reach by the states, on the upper shelf of rights that somehow "made the cut."

I am heartbroken. This blog hovered in my mind and on my fingertips for much of the past week, but I couldn't bring myself to type, to put words down in black and white, admit my grief. In so many ways our country seems to go backwards, and we swim now across a dangerous current while sighting for a distant shore, not to advance the rights of women and others, but merely to grasp the sand in places we used to stand.

Revive the Revolution

What started as a summer of hope and opening (hopening?) has become more narrow and bleak, as if the incinerating heat of July has bleached optimism from me as it bleaches green from our yard. The Fourth was particularly poignant this year, as Aden, William and I discussed our mixed emotions around our embattled country.

As any parent, teacher or coach knows, it's hard to watch a family-, class-, or team-member stumble; it's painful for the one who falters as well as for the whole group. In the same way, it's painful to witness our country's missteps around containment of the coronavirus, shocking to watch the blatant acts of racism committed on our streets, humbling to recognize that we have grown up with, and are part of, systemic injustices.

One headline gripped me as I wrestled with the Fourth, practically rippled across my web browser like an inspired banner: "Let's Finish the American Revolution. Our nation's founding was a mess of contradictions. We must push America closer to its ideals." (Finish American Revolution.)  In a powerful op-ed for the New York Times, Timothy Egan wrote that "it will take an imaginative projection of  the best instincts" of our nation's founders to help re-create a shared narrative for our nation, one that speaks to the high aims of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and understands the flaws that their authors - and our nation - embodied.

Egan lists some of the contradictions in our founding fathers. Nine presidents held slaves, and only one (Washington) freed them all in his will. Roosevelt warred against Native Americans but evolved, says Egan, to become the first to add universal health care to the list of our fundamental rights (another right not recognized, but that's another blog). Jefferson, a slave-holder, wrote "all men are created equal." He may not have lived the truth expressed in that phrase, but perhaps now it's time - and our turn - to embrace this biblical belief and make it real.

As Senator Tammy Duckworth said in her powerful editorial response to Tucker Carlson's baseless  accusation that she lacked patriotism: "...while we have never been a perfect union, we have always sought to be a more perfect union -- and in order to do so, we cannot whitewash our missteps and mistakes. We must learn from them instead." (NYT Duckworth)

Since its inception our country has sustained a tension between the vision of what it wanted to be - what it could be - and the difficult and painful realities of its existence, predicated on the robbery of land from native inhabitants and the slave labor of people brought here in chains. Now is our chance to finish the revolution, to revive not only our vision for our country but our concrete plans to make those dreams reality.