What Fresh Hell Is This?

One thing eternally entertaining about both parenting and politics is that just when you've got a game plan in action, the little buggers go and change on you. You can be finally set with an answer to "Mommy, did you and Daddy ever do drugs?" and they'll look up at you with glowing trusting eyes like ET and ask, "Mama, why do you and Daddy lock the door to your room sometimes?" Likewise, you can be resigned to the retirement of William Rehnquist -- maybe not okay with it but resigned to the fact that he will be replaced by someone equally as frightening; after all, he is 800 years old and we know he wants to be replaced by a Republican nominee -- and then out of nowhere, POW! Sandra Day O'Connor socks you like the Incredible Hulk. So while you're still wiping up the spit the roundhouse knocked out of you, you realize that a man whose compassionate conservatism allows him to call an 82-year-old woman old to her face (Times, 2005) is going to replace ol' Centrist Sandra with someone slightly to the right of Fred Flintstone.

It is nice to know that there is absolutely no satisfaction in being right. All the yammering I did during the 2004 elections -- hell, during the 2000 elections -- about how this election was about the Supremes, not about a chief executive whose power is so limited by a split Congress...well, it doesn't make me feel any better to have been right. Serve up some right on toast; I hear it tastes just like shit on a shingle.

I spent six years, off and on, working in abortion clinics. It was my first job out of college and the reason I became a nurse. I know a hell of a lot more than Georgie does about compassionate anything, and I earned that knowledge from listening to story upon story upon story from my patients. My patients taught me how hard people work to keep their heads above water, how complicated it can be to get from their house to the pharmacy to refill their birth control, how the money to pay for it might not be there when they do make it. My patients came in terrified by the propaganda of the right, believing they would leave the clinic infertile or dead, but desperate enough to show up anyway, They showed up, just as they will show up at the houses of illegal providers after whoever Bush's nominee is succeeds in tossing the remaining shreds of Roe. Human need and human conditions don't play a part in his compassionate conservatism, or in the lives of the people who elected him.

Bush voters all carry the responsibility of this carnage. When women die of illegal abortion,as they did before Roe, as Becky Bell did in Indiana in 1988, as Rosie Jimenez did in the president's home state of Texas, it is the responsibility of all who put him in office. If I could, I would sentence you all to explain to any of my patients in person why you thought your continued affluence and fear were worth their lives.

Remember the glowing ET eyes from the first paragraph? Here's my problem: how do I explain to the owner of said eyes, my gorgeous and perfect offspring, that the reason he doesn't have any civil liberties is that half the country (well, half of the half that were eligible to vote...which makes around 18% of the total population) elected a village idiot to tell the rest of us what to do.