The last thing I ever said in person to one of my brothers before he died was that I would fight for healthcare for the regular folks. I need to do more. I’m weary, struggles that never end can wear one down, though.
Today would have been the birthday of another brother who also died far too early from preventable causes.
Today is also the day the federal government shuts down most likely because a bastion of wimps and neocons have taken supposedly taken direction from an astroturf “movement” to reduce the size of government and sever all federal funding from social programs whose support touches the lives of almost everyone in the U.S. I owe a great deal to Planned Parenthood. I used their services to get yearly checkups and birth control prescriptions and devices in my teens and throughout my twenties. Without them I would probably have had an accidental pregnancy with a man I lived with and who I tried to leave several times before I successfully was able to do so. I was stalked by this guy when I left.
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| Public domain image from Wikipedia Commons. |
My life would have been ruined if I had gotten pregnant by that man I lived with for 10 years. I wanted to get away from him after only a few months of being with him, but without a family support system I didn’t see any way to do that without becoming homeless. I believed him when he told me I had no other options. So I stayed in school, took out loans to complete college and went to planned parenthood for my healthcare needs and to get help making sure I wouldn’t bring an unwanted child into the world. I was lucky. I didn’t get pregnant.
Now a bunch of selfish bullies, nearly all white and male, on Capitol Hill are trying to strong arm legislation through as a rider on a funding bill that would defund Planned Parenthood, the very organization that helped me to be able to get away from an abusive long term relationship because there was not a child connecting me to him. I doubt I would have ever been able to get away from him if I had had a child.
This whole tea party, fundamentalist, militia mentality connects to what I hope are the death throes of a group of dis-empowered patriarchal a**holes. These guys believed from early on that they had a right to rule over their families, their communities, and their nation because white guys had always ruled here. Now that change is happening, although at a far slower rate than one called for by demographics, these guys are doing everything they possibly can to regain what little power they can hold onto for a short while, even if it means the death of thousands of and the destruction of tens or hundreds of thousands more lives.
Such utter disregard for their brother and sister citizens shows that this has nothing to do with finance, Christianity, or governance and everything to do with entitlements – the entitlements that small minded and probably small body-parted white (or orange) men feel are being denied to them. I hope these are the last throes of segregationist, racist, misogynist America. Right now it is women being attacked but the elderly, our children, our ill and infirm are next up on the tea party gallows. This next year will be hell as these little men stomp their feet, and lash out wildly trying to hurt anything and everything they can as they manipulate, steal, coerce and destroy government of, for and by the people.
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| 1908 Child Laborer in North Carolina. Wikipedia Commons. |
I for one will not let them do this to us. I believe there are enough like me out there to stop them.
Let’s roll.
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