When I look at today’s GOP, I just don’t understand why they are so fired up at tearing down stuff that helps people.
I mean look at them. They want to gut programs that have helped millions:
Social Security (Happy 80th, BTW! Here’s to 100 and more!)
Medicare
Voting Rights
Immigration
.
Have you heard the latest? Donald Trump proclaimed that the 14th Amendment — the one that grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States — is unconstitutional.
That Furball, The Donald, wants to pretend that rights that are in the Constitution are, well, unconstitutional. And the rest of the clowns are falling all over themselves to agree with him!
Ummmmm, do they even have a clue that “Constitutional” means,well, in the fucking Constitution?
Apparently not. Because, you see, these folks just can’t get no … <i?they can’t get no. No no no…</i>
You probably can’t tell from my blog posts, but I love words. I love the sound of them, the feel of them in my mouth and at my fingertips. How changing just one word can transform a sentence from shit to shinola.
So I love it when somebody proves me right-ish. Or like I’m in the right pew.
For decades one term has bothered me. “Pro-Choice.”
Abortion ain’t a “whole wheat or rye” sort of “choice.”
So I’ve had my thinking cap on for all that time, trying to think of a better way to say it. What else could it be called? What word can express the magnitude of that decision for any woman.
And am I the person to come up with it anyway? You see, I never had an abortion. I never was able to get pregnant. So perhaps it isn’t my role.
But I do know women who’ve had abortions. I’ve sat with them, talked with them, consoled them. They have been friends and near-strangers who somehow tell me their deepest trouble. They are not women who are making a “choice.” Rather they are women slicing a piece of their own heart out, most often because they have no“choice.”
That includes two women who were forced to have late-term terminations. You know, the kind that is being outlawed in state after state, mostly by men, with no exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother. No basis in the real world of what women face.
These two women had nearly identical stories. Their prenatal testing showed that their fetuses had trisomy 18 (From WebMD):
A “trisomy” means that the baby has an extra chromosome in some or all of the body’s cells. In the case of trisomy 18, the baby has three copies of chromosome 18. This causes many of the baby’s organs to develop in an abnormal way.
There are three types of trisomy 18:
Full trisomy 18. The extra chromosome is in every cell in the baby’s body. This is by far the most common type of trisomy 18.
Partial trisomy 18.The child has only part of an extra chromosome 18. That extra part may be attached to another chromosome in the egg or sperm (called a translocation). This type of trisomy 18 is very rare.
Mosaic trisomy 18. The extra chromosome 18 is only in some of the baby’s cells. This form of trisomy 18 is also rare.
***
What Is the Outlook for Babies With Trisomy 18?
Because trisomy 18 causes such serious physical defects, many babies with the condition don’t survive to birth. About half of babies who are carried full-term are stillborn. Boys with trisomy 18 are more likely to be stillborn than girls.
Of those babies who do survive, less than 10% live to reach their first birthday. Children who do live past that milestone often have severe health problems that require a large amount of care. Only a very small number of people with this condition live into their 20s or 30s.
Both women were happily married. They and their husbands wanted their babies; they were devastated by the news. These women had to choose when, not if the baby they wanted so much would die. One of them said that because their fetus had a condition called Intra-uterine growth restriction, the baby would essentially starve to death inside of her. And then she’d go through labor.
See what I mean about “choice”? It’s way more like being between a rock and a hard place. Or just being in a hard place.
In all my years, and with the numerous women I’ve known who’ve terminated a pregnancy, there was only one who did it casually. She’s a staunch Republican.
So I was delighted when I read about Sister Joan Chittister recently. Because she’s the one who made me realize it’s not us, it’s them.
We’re not necessarily the ones with the wrong term. They are. Because they are DECIDEDLY NOT PRO-LIFE:
I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there.
Thanks Google.
That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.
The history surrounding the history of Joseph McCarthy, the late Republican senator from Wisconsin, is enough to make a “freedom of speech” lovin’ woman like me shudder. I’m sure it is no coincidence that Senator McCarthy died right after I was born. He wouldn’t have stood a chance against me once I hit grade school.
Anyway, for my foreign readers, Senator McCarthy was a nasty, paranoid piece of work. Here’s Wikipedia’s take on him:
Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread Communistsubversion.[1] He was noted for making claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. Ultimately, his tactics and inability to substantiate his claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate.
The term McCarthyism, coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy’s practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today the term is used more generally in reference to demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.[2]
I also learned that McCarthy was equally ruthless at “outing” gays.
Separated at Birth? Google Image
When McCarthy claimed that someone was a communist, generally speaking, it ruined his/her life. There were many innocent victims of McCarthyism, whose professional and private lives changed. Folks were fired, not hired, scorned. It impacted people in government, industry and in the arts. Many of us have heard of the folks in show business in particular who were charged. And anybody who had had any dealings with the Soviets was fair game.
We all like to think that we would never cast spurious allegations against anyone or anything on our planet. We all like to think that we are good, kind souls, who would never malign anyone unjustly. That we would never spread rumors or false charges.
Friends, yesterday I learned that I had done just that. I “red-baited.” So while I can ‘splain, I must set the scene.
John’s sister sent us a link to a video:
Naturally I wrote back because I love animal videos, they make me smile.
It was only the next day, when deleting emails from my phone, that I learned of my crime. Because instead of typing “He’s So Cute!” as I had intended, instead I maligned that little guy. Accused him unjustly. Probably ruined his new life for ever:
“He’s a Soviet,” I, courtesy of spell check, responded.*
Fortunately, John’s sister does not succumb to hysterics. Or to the politics of fear. Or to spell check. In fact, she gave me the benefit of the doubt when I confessed my crime to her.
I was scratching my head. I thought, is this some old Russian film and Elyse recognized it?
For the record, please let me state that I have no inside knowledge of the political leanings of this moose, any members of the baby moose’s immediate family, or indeed, I have no information about moose politics in general. May I also state, unequivocally, that I have never actually seen a moose in the wild.
Lastly, let me state that as a reasonably well-informed individual, I also know that the Soviet Union is no longer a union, and even the folks in the former Soviet Union are not soviets.
*Clearly, there are communist infiltrators at work at spell check. We must seek them out and destroy their lives. Let’s get Ted Cruz on it.
Periodically, I take some heat here at FiftyFourAndAHalf for being one sided in my political commentary. For not saying nice things about the GOP. There is some validity to those charges. My bad.
But, frankly, there are loads of folks who write up the other side. I have said that if the Republican Party hadn’t taken Ronald Reagan’s “The Government IS the Problem” quite so much to heart, well, things might be different. I might be different.
But as things turned out, you see, well, I’m a liberal. An unapologetic liberal.
When I look at today’s GOP (which is very different from the pre-Reagan GOP) I am astonished that there are folks who go along with the things these folks are advocating. They’re cra-cray!
Only today, Governor and GOP Presidential hopeful Scott Walker announced that he might just have to bomb Iran his first day in office. You know, before he knows were the bathrooms are in the White House. The minute he gets near the button, well, he might just push it.
Some newly elected prezes watch a parade and dance at the Inaugural balls. But not Scott! Nope! Nope, he will inaugurate his own balls by starting a fucking war.
Where the hell do you think I got this one?
Even ¿Jeb!, the brother of the last GOP guy to bring us a stupid war, thought that Scotty was going a wee bit too far:
One thing that I won’t do is just say, as a candidate, ‘I’m going to tear up the agreement on the first day.’ That’s great, that sounds great but maybe you ought to check in with your allies first, maybe you ought to appoint a secretary of state, maybe secretary of defense, you might want to have your team in place, before you take an act like that.
Scotty, however, disagreed:
At a press conference after his appearance at the Family Leader Summit here Saturday, Walker was asked if he thinks Bush is wrong. “He may have his opinion. I believe that a president shouldn’t wait to act until they put a cabinet together or an extended period of time,” Walker said.
“I believe they should be prepared to act on the very first day they take office. It’s very possible – God forbid, but it’s very possible – that the next president could be called to take aggressive actions, including military action, on the first day in office. And I don’t want a president who is not prepared to act on day one.
This is not a man who thinks he might have to react to a 9/11-like attack. This is a man with no military experience except the fucking Boy Scouts, And he is planning to go to war on January 20, 2017.
Does this make you feel safe? Secure? Like your children and your children’s children will be hunky dory?
Personally, it gives me a feeling of déjà vu:
Photo Credit; My memory and Google Image’s
Contrast that with the Democrats. They just negotiated an historic agreement to avoid war. To see what we can do to not destroy the planet. Well done, Blue Team!
Wendy Sherman, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs who was involved in the negotiations, described what happened after the deal was concluded. After the cameras and the reporters were gone.
[E]ach of the foreign ministers of the P5+1 group – the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany – and Iran “made a statement about what this meant to them.”
“All of the remarks, by all of the ministers, including [Iranian Foreign] Minister [Javad] Zarif, were very moving, because it was private, and it was about what this deal meant to them.”
But the last spot was reserved for John Kerry.*
“When I was 22, I went to war” – [Kerry said] before choking up.
“He couldn’t get the words out,” [Sherman] recalled. “And everybody was completely spellbound.”
Kerry composed himself and continued, “I went to war and it became clear to me that I never wanted to go to war again.”
Do you have kids? Grand kids? Siblings who might be called upon to fight? Which side should you be supporting?
So I am unapologetic about supporting the folks who believe that before going to war, they should work for peace.
I had the poster. I had the necklace. Google has the image.
You know, I’m getting pretty cynical. Folks all across the world are going all Ayn Rand, feeling like folks shouldn’t work together to solve problems. That every body should fend for themselves. Or, as my Dad used to say when folks just didn’t give a damn about each other (or didn’t save him the last cookie): “I’ve got mine, how are you?”
And really, I’m getting kind of discouraged. Civilization was built because humans figured out that working together gets more done than working individually. And of course, the “cradle of Civilization” is Greece.
I am not an economist. I am not a European. Hell, I don’t really know what’s going on over there, what led to the economic collapse that Greece is experiencing. I don’t know why the Germans and the French are standing idly by watching it happen with their hands on their hips. But even I’m smart enough to know that the impact of a collapse of Greece, in both actual and symbolic terms, is not a good idea.
But I just read the coolest article. Thom Feeney, 29, of London, is a shoe salesman. And he has set up a GoFundMe site to collect donations to enable Greece to pay its loans. He said:
All this dithering over Greece is getting boring. European ministers flexing their muscles and posturing over whether they can help the Greek people or not. Why don’t we the people just sort it instead?”
He has raised more than €500,000 in two days. The Greeks need €1.6 billion.
It’s amazing what one person can do sometimes. (I believe this photo is from Al Jazeera, which reported this story)
Crowdfunding is not the solution to Greece’s problems. In fact, I don’t think that crowdfunding is the solution to big country-wide or international problems.
But even I, with my belief in strong government, think this is pretty damn cool.
And maybe, just maybe, it is what we need to do more often.
FiftyFourandAHalf 