Is America the land of opportunity? For whom? Will America still be the land of opportunity five years from now? For all of us?
Is America the land of opportunity after the ruling stealing away reproductive freedom like it is some kind of shell game, run by ostensibly religious people determined to impose their views upon all of us, whatever our religious beliefs?
Do any others among those who read these words know what it us like not to know whether your family will receive the slightest respect from your own government?
Do any of you know what it is like to try to plan a life, not knowing whether you will be re-criminalized? Recriminalized by an illegitimate court proudly writing that it hopes to remove all privacy rights? Proudly exhibiting its determination to make your very familial bonds a potential basis for imprisonment or exclusion from your own country if you do not abandon your family? The country you were born in?
Those of you who are offended by statements of admiration for other countries: if your country was threatening to re-establish laws that you fought to free yourself of your entire life as a young person, that criminalized your very identity, and countries in Europe firmly protected those very rights and identities, how would you feel then?
Make no mistake, this country is on the edge of madness.
It is a madness prompted and ignited by the reaction to the election of a black man as president.
It is a madness that now metastasized into a primitive, tribal, and reactionary rage.
This rage is now sweeping across our nation like a twister, carrying away with it rights that we thought were firmly established.
Some us know that we can likely escape if we absolutely have to. But what about those like the women today, yes, today, in Ohio, who cannot afford to take work off or get childcare in order to obtain an abortion after an unplanned pregnancy, or a pregnancy endangering their life of health, or a pregnancy made dangerous by cancer, or a pregnancy caused by a violation of the person by rape? Or by the violation of the person by incest involving a youth?
What are those neighbors expected to do?
We are living in a terrible time. We watch a demented war criminal who attacked America in 2016 rape and crush good people in a neighboring country. We watch while our neighbors – and ourselves – wait.
We wait to see whether our own rights really will be stripped away. We wait to see whether the countries led by corrupt dictators will eventually really bring the war our way.
This is the foreboding some of us are living with, while the rest of us complain about inflation and ignore an attack on our capitol and our very system of democratic self-governance, pretending that a shell of a political party is still just another choice on the menu like it was for our parents, stubbornly refusing to listen even to a madman’s own former staff.
It is not just another menu choice.
It is a threat to some – no, many – of your own friends and family.
Wake up. Wake up, and help us.
MOVE. Leave Ohio, NOW.
Men, women, children, families — NOW is the time to leave Ohio.
Open our homes and communities to these refugees from madness. Provide public funding for their escape — just like the west did when The Wall divided Berlin in an earlier generation.
Refuse to travel to or attend conferences in any of these states. Refuse to knowingly do business with any business located in Ohio or other states doing these things. Anyone currently working for an Ohio-based employer should resign. Now. Tell your management why you’re leaving.
We are learning how to impose sanctions on criminal nations like Russia. We should do the same with criminal states like Ohio.
The schism dividing Ohio and similar states from the civilized portions of America is not just about abortion, nor even just about any of the social issues that the GOP is using to destroy representative democracy in America.
It is about fundamental values like a respect for truth, facts, reason, science, and the rule of law.
I’m ready for civilized America to sever ALL ties with these reprobate deplorable outcasts. If the price of preserving a civilized America for my children and grandchildren (I now have two) is to excise diseased parts like Ohio, Texas, and Florida then I say — without reservation — “cut them off”. My wife and I should NOT have to flee as refugees ourselves because willfully ignorant deplorables in states like Ohio are destroying the very fabric of our nation.
I’m done trying tolerate and “listen to” this mob.
Cut them off, rescue the refugees, and let them stew in their own toxins.
Do you have the ability to approve comments? JTM has a comment on this thread awaiting moderation, I suspect because it includes several links.
Now more than ever, America is an idea and a country worth fighting for! We must do everything we can to truly make it great again.
Checking in here. It’s been a while!
But somehow, Republicans have convinced their voters that owning a gun is proof of “freedom” and both parties tell their voters that the USA is the land of opportunity.
There is an opening here for the Democratic Party if they want to lead, but it will require aligning with labor and not Wall Street.
I suspect it’s more effective and easier to align with Joe Manchin.
Attacking disgruntled non-college educated workers as “racist” and Limbaugh listeners, baskets of deplorables, after Democratic trade and banking policy devastated this demographic just makes it easier for people like Manchin and McConnell and McCarthy to welcome them with open arms.
Sigh