Washington, DC – A student at Michigan, after the usual mass murder situation, commented that it was like being hunted. Women have felt that way throughout history, but now men feel that way too. They feel that way because it’s true. We are, all of us, prey for any annoyed person who simply feels like shooting up whatever place is convenient. Recent studies have found that young women have been caught up in a “catch and release” hunt. Catch, assault, rape, release. Or if that doesn’t quite constitute sufficient comfort, kill. According to recent studies, the result is that 6 out of 10 young women and girls are depressed to the degree that keeps them from normal activities. It wasn’t mentioned that perhaps they were just afraid to leave the relative safety of their homes.
Yet, our current group of rightist radicals on the Supreme Court or Vatican West sees any attempt to get a handle on this insanity as an assault on the Constitution’s Second Amendment. Let it be noted that the first three words of that dangerous amendment are “A well regulated.” It seems that that sentence has been summarily amended to edit out those first three words. In this dystopian version, there are no such things as too many guns. Finally, in one rare instance, the parents of a six-year-old who brought a gun to school, one of three reported recently, were arrested for child endangerment and some other charges.
The radicals in what was the former Republican Party in Michigan have taken to refusing entry into party meetings to other party members who disagree with their vision.
The Nazi party was one of many in the years after World War I. Over time their Master Race philosophy gained enough acceptance that Hitler was elected, and the rest, as is said, is history. If you replace the word “master” with “white,” one can surmise that we here in the US might have a problem. Hitler and his cronies were anti-religion, most likely because they wanted to limit the vaunted power of the church leaders. As it turned out, he had nothing to fear from Pious XI, but they didn’t know that then. The Nazi party was anti-immigrant, homophobic, and anti-anything not white. Add misogyny, which is pretty much the battle cry one heard in Charlottesville, VA.
The challenge to the remnant of us who know history, and are perhaps old enough to remember the violent struggle, is to claw some rights for people of color, women, and folks whose relationships differ from a halcyon pairing like Beaver’s folks. Women got the right to vote because many women put their bodies on the line protesting on the streets for equal protections. Many were arrested, raped, beaten, and force-fed. Yet today, women have been, once again, relegated to second class by having their rights to medical privacy downgraded. The same attack is being leveled on people with gender dysmorphia. These assaults are being leveled because a very aggressive assembly of church institutions are attempting to impose their unique version of God’s will on everyone else. These are a minority, yet, lacking any coordinated response from those who oppose the imposition of a perverse “Christian” version of Sharia law, they are winning.
The iron fist of white supremacy, misogyny, and homophobia is strangling all the rights guaranteed save one, the right to bear arms. The Declaration of Independence asserts that all “men” are endowed by their creator with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Curiously the word “men” was considered to mean the male gender, and actually the white male gender. Black men had the “right” to vote, however repressed that might have been and continues to be, well before any woman had the right to vote.
The current radical right agenda appears to wish to negate those three rights or perhaps restore the gender-specific word “men.” They hold the right to bear arms sacrosanct, while that right nullifies the right to life for countless numbers. They negate the right to liberty by denying women and those with severe bodily dysmorphia the right to bodily agency, and they desire to deny the right to pursue happiness to folks whose definition of happiness doesn’t coincide with theirs.
Perhaps it is “woke” to care about feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, etc., but I would much prefer to be awake in the bright light of day than be a zombie blindly sleepwalking through life being led around by corrupt false interpretations of God’s commandments. We’ve seen where this leads. Fear of knowledge, book banning, and just plain lunacy are gaining purchase. It’s way past time to stop this in its tracks.
