Hekate
Hekate's JournalWe who are Boomers grew up in the years when polio epidemics scared the crap out of us
…and our parents. Every single school had its share of kids in heavy leg braces — and if they couldn’t manage stairs, they weren’t in public school. You could become a quadriplegic or die of it, too.
Then came the polio vaccine and parents lined up around the block to make sure their kids got the jab. Only a very few religious nuts refused.
As for diseases we’d already been vaccinated for, the ravages of smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, and lockjaw were within living memory of our parents and grandparents. Public schools required proof of vaccination, and no responsible parent would try to duck out.
The 20th century, especially the second half, now looks like a triumphal march of public health.
Then… we failed to teach our children and their children? It wasn’t in any of the school textbooks? WTF did we do to ourselves? How did public health become a weapon in the culture wars?
She's spectacular, but she lacks a penis. The GOP reeks of misogyny, and...
…the rest of the country struggles with it as well.
I have watched Hillary Clinton being used as a GOP punching bag since the 1990s. By the time she ran for President in 2016, the contagion into the Dem party was so bad that we at DU ( !!! ) had knock-down drag-out fights and pitched battles over both her fitness for office and whether anyone in the country would vote for her at all because the GOP had made her so toxic. And let it be remembered that she still won the popular vote by 3,000,000 votes.
I think VP Kamala Harris is qualified and if we do our jobs and GOTV people will indeed vote for her. But WE have to believe in her and not waste time fighting each other. WE have to recognize the toxicity of American misogyny and be upfront about it. As Shirley Chisholm so notably pointed out, of the obstacles she faced in life, misogyny was worse than racism.
This is a realization I had about my Mom who was raised Catholic & never would have ...
… had an abortion. She was born in 1924, just to give you an idea of her era.
When I was in high school it was all before Roe, as I mentioned in another post — but the argument was all over the back sections of TIME magazine, which I read avidly. The Pill was a big deal in the same magazine. I talked to Mom about things I didn’t understand and she was usually very informative. But when I asked her what “abortion” was she said tersely, “It’s murder.”
But here’s another piece of her life and my observations: in the first 9 years of my life she was pregnant 7 times and had 4 living children (I’m the oldest). One child was a full-term stillbirth that broke her heart. During one miscarriage she almost hemorrhaged to death on the operating table, and had an out of body experience where she watched the surgeons try to save her life and she literally had to decide to return to the cares of her existence so that I and my first brother would not be orphaned as toddlers — as she said, she breathed in. During another miscarriage it was simply that she leaked blood for months until she was pretty anemic and the family doc questioned her and ordered her to go get a D&C, because anemia wasn’t the worst thing that could happen, sepsis was.
I am 76 this month and there are puzzle-pieces I am still putting together. Some of it is in pure revulsion toward the forced birth movement. I realized that #1 they have redefined all the most effective forms of contraception as abortifacients, which is a lie. #2 they have renamed as “abortion” procedures that had been standard of care for miscarrying women certainly as long as I’d been alive — which is another of their lies. A D&C is not an abortion.
I was pretty disgusted about #1, because when I became sexually active I chose my birth control very carefully and understood how each worked. 5 years on the Pill. A couple of years between my babies I used a diaphragm. Several years with an IUD. But according to the forced birthers I was destroying “babies” the whole time.
But what really tore it for me was how after Dobbs forced birth legislatures went batshit crazy all over this country and made it pellucidly clear that they are perfectly fine with women like my Mom hemorrhaging to death or dying of sepsis — because what was standard of care for at least a century is suddenly a goddam abortion. And the extraction of Mom’s stillborn baby? The wanted little redheaded boy? He was dead, he was literally beginning to rot, because that’s what dead things do. But according to these batshit crazy people, that was also an abortion.
Please, please, do not believe their lies.
Banning abortion is not about cute little Gerber babies & how selfish women are for wanting to
…. not have cute little babies. It is about controlling women and girls and their futures by any means necessary — using shame as a big part of it. But just to cut to the chase: “pro-life” Republicans lie their socks off. They never have and never will give a flying fig if the women and children of this nation starve to death. They are, however, good at blaming women.
I do not know how old you are, qwlauren, or what your high school years were like, or how your mom pounded home the necessary lessons to keep you safe. So I will tell you what it was like to graduate high school in 1965 and go to college before Roe.
I was a virgin and a very determined one. I wanted to go to college. Girls who gave in were called names — “slut” being one and “mommy” being another. Because contraception was not available to unmarried girls under 21. I was lucky — the boy I was in love with in high school had a best friend who had to get married in his first year in college, and the prospect of that scared the bejeebers out of my boyfriend.
Here were your choices if you got pregnant: a very early marriage at 16 or so, or give up your firstborn to adoption. Keeping your “out of wedlock baby” was really not much of an option, given the extremely harsh social consequences, like having to drop out of high school or college, the end of career prospects, no childcare, welfare which was barely enough to keep body and soul together and came with a hefty dose of shame.
Abortion was illegal as hell, and very dangerous as a consequence.
Which reminds me: did you read Dobbs? Did you notice the antiquated language that schmuck Alito used? You really need to read Dobbs. He thinks women and girls who give birth to out of wedlock babies (he stopped short of calling them bastards) really owe it to childless married couples to give them up for adoption.
After 50 years of watching this battle rage from Roe on thru Dobbs, I can tell you right now that so called conservatives care nothing whatsoever about helping women and their children. Every chance they get, they cut welfare, childcare, food benefits, medical care from prenatal onward through death by old age, and any kind of help with shelter. Sex education for kids or even adults? Not a chance.
Conservatives resent women competing for jobs that rightly belong to men. They are pissed at women having babies and then expecting some kind of governmental help to raise them. They are good at blaming us for everything about our lives and our gender. They want to control our futures as God intended, and as it used to be in the good old days when we could not control our fertility and never knew from one month to another if we were pregnant — again.
It's amazing. I recall Twitter communications being of incredible use in uprisings/protests against
…dictators. Before Musk.
Recently I read an Op-ed piece by a scientist who says scientists were using Twitter extensively to share info, have conversations, and even share papers. Before Musk.
Now the scientists are leaving in droves, hounded by trolls they cannot block, hide, or defend themselves from, and by Musk’s decision to make sure the scientists’ factual postings are buried under mountains of anti-science toxic dumps.
I never was a poster on Twitter, and I admit I joined the crew of DUers who reflexively dissed it. It’s only now that we are watching Musk insanely reduce it to rubble, that I am reading how valuable it actually was. The scientist mentioned above acknowledged that Mastodon and so forth have potential, but said nobody as yet has anything like the infrastructure and utility of the original Twitter.
Epic burn. I love Paul Krugman to bits.
“Rich men in general, and tech bros in particular, are often under the delusion that they have deep insights into monetary economics, usually coming from what they vaguely remember from Atlas Shrugged." ~~ Paul Krugman ~~
This is such a disturbing thread, that I will say this and move on...
War itself is wrong. I don't blame my country (America) for trying to end WWII, even this way...
But I bring a certain knowledge base to any discussion, and overall knowledge of WWII seems to be dying out in the general US population. It’s not just that my undergrad major was Asian and Pacific History, and that Dr. George Akita was an outstanding professor of Japanese history at University of Hawai’i, where I grew up. Dr. Stephan led my senior seminar on Japanese history — the Greater East Asia War, as the Japanese named it. Nobody was making apologies for Japan’s behavior in the war.
WWII was my parent’s war. Their personal stories were sparse — Dad volunteered, memorized the eye chart in advance or he would have been rejected, served in Arizona. Mom worked in a defense plant for awhile. Neither made anything of their own experiences.
*But my mother pointed out to me every neighbor or friend who was a survivor of the Holocaust. Told me about the Jewish refugee boy in her Colorado high school who had witnessed great piles of books burning in the street outside his home.
*Told me about the Relocation Camps (as they were called then) and how horribly unjust they were to Americans of Japanese Ancestry.
*In one neighborhood where we lived there was a woman who survived starvation and horror in a prisoner of war camp run by the Japanese Army in the Philippines. Mom told me her story as well.
*My mother’s cousin who became a doctor served in combat in Germany. As he and his company slogged toward an enemy emplacement they located the gunner — a 12 year old German boy conscripted by the Nazis who had frozen in abject terror and could not pull the trigger. They rescued him. For the rest of her days my great-aunt had masses said for the welfare of that boy in gratitude for the life of her own son.
*Mom told me about the Rape of Nanking, and the photo of a toddler abandoned by a railroad track that just about undid her.
*My US Congressman and then Senator for many years in Hawai’i was Daniel K. Inouye, a Nisei who lost his right arm while fighting in Italy in the 442nd.
Mom was not telling me these events to inspire hate — but to say, Never Again.
The war against the Axis had to be won. America made plenty of mistakes, but we stopped that war. I will never apologize for that.
There were books aplenty in my parents’ house, both fact and fiction about WWII. When I was old enough I read them. But more importantly for a child just learning to read was LIFE magazine — — in which I saw my first photographs of the immediate aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the dead, the dying, the maimed, the cities blown to matchsticks.
Imagine how sick I felt several years ago to be informed by a DUer that all information and all photos of the carnage had been suppressed by the US government. That was a bald-faced lie. Knowledge of the effects of The Bomb and radiation were widespread, there were photographs of the dead and injured and of the destruction in books and magazines, and the whole genre of science fiction had a nuclear apocalyptic thread running through it. There was an anti-nuclear bomb movement in this country from that point on.
It’s taken me all day to finish this, what with interruptions here at home. But I will cut and paste this if needed.
Brilliantly, brilliantly stated. ...
That Trump will be tried for his coup attempt is not a violation of his rights. It is a fulfillment of his rights. It is the grace of the American republic. In other systems, when your coup attempt fails, what follows is not a trial.Timothy Snyder
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Gender: FemaleHometown: Central Coast, California
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 90,633
