I don’t know how to make sense of the decision that came down this week. Even though we had a preview of this week’s decision from the leak, it’s still a gut punch to see the official ruling.
Seeing us move backwards, taking control of our own bodies away from half our population, is unnerving. It leaves me with big, uneasy questions like – what will I do if things continue to decline in our country? What would it take to make me consider relocating if this sort of behavior continues?
Last year, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and at the time I wondered how more people didn’t protest or leave as things became increasingly limiting and punishing for people. But with the events I’ve watched us live through in the recent past and this newest devastation, I see how it happens that we keep sitting in the increasingly warming water, hoping it’ll cool soon – hopefully not until the point we find ourselves boiling to death but I fear that possibility.
I haven’t processed all the implications and still find myself generally stupefied, dazed, bewildered. I am trying to find the bright spots of hope, like the businesses that have come out to offer their support to those who will be impacted. But I worry about the possibility that things are going to get way worse, that these repeated blows to our lived experience (and also the general destruction of connection and trust and care for one another) may just destroy our world.
I’m not a doomsday person; I know I will come around to a perspective of optimism, of hope, of action. But for now, I’m battening down the hatches, keeping my people close while trying to remember that somewhere inside, we all share common fears and values, even if they’re expressed differently.
