The Trail

I was devastated and left the house to sit on the bench outside where the air is clear, and I can gaze at our beginnings as I ponder our near end of our democracy. It wasn’t the abortion question I was reacting to so much as the fact that Roe vs Wade was affirmed in one form or another by roughly ten other court decisions…ten. It was settled. Not to mention two Supreme Court nominees lied in their confirmations stating that the decision was settled and then voted to overturn it. This has never happened in the history of this country.

My alarm is real as my grandfather’s might have been in the 1920’s when big money ruled much of the economics and social behavior it is controlling now and opened the door to the Great Recession ruining countless lives. People will cheer this as they have been taught to, but it will be the undoing of this country entirely because it will not stop. As I write this they are going after a 1982 ruling that immigrants can get a public education…that is where our parents, grandparents and great grandparents got their start to provide all of us with what we had growing up. Taking that away will provide us with essentially slave labor for the dark money changers.

Justice Alito bastardized his courts affirmation that indeed corporations were people, and it has gone downhill from there. Politicians have been bought and sold, and if they don’t toe the mark for our last President, they are cast aside for there are others who will take the money. Alito wrote the opinion of the winning arguments for undaunted political expenditure and now with the fruits of that labor he is writing the probable opinion overturning a fifty-year-old decision that has seen Constitutional affirmation many times since 1973. He has been quoted other decisions were “deeply rooted” in precedence but having forms of Roe v Wade affirmed ten plus times doesn’t fit that? He is picking and choosing. So fine then, let’s revisit his Citizens United ruling that continues to put more money in the pockets of the candidates and the elected than any single thing in history.

The court has opened the door to monetary influence on Constitutional amendment rulings. Even public opinion shouldn’t necessarily matter to the court as its decisions are grounded in the Constitution; or were. The court is on a dangerous path when the trail is paved with green.

There are other pitfalls in this probable decision on abortion that quickly dwarfs the arguments and do not quickly lend themselves to discovery. Approximately the same number of babies will die in back-alley abortions or die of malnutrition or lack of education leading to all kinds of public issues. The mothers will bleed to death as they did in the years before R v W. So what lives are we saving? Who will take care of the children left behind as mothers don’t survive?

At the same time, people have to realize we just went through huge push back on wearing a piece of cloth on our faces, in the name of freedom only to have our personal freedoms violated in a very real way on a case that has been affirmed many times by the courts. I am not a feminist, but practicality leads to push back on the states that want to imprison women for abortions and don’t even ask who fathered the child. Nothing sexist there huh? Isn’t that the ruination of one for the pleasure of another?

There are solutions to all of this if people would stop pounding the table of right vs wrong and decide to collectively find better solutions. One easy solution is to triple the budgets of Planned Parenthood and other counseling organizations. Teach more kids about the pitfalls that will come to their lives if they don’t use contraceptives and or abstain. Counseling them on how to be more productive as citizens. Help them with education and job placement. It is an investment and would work, but many of our legislators want only investment in themselves and people have become so narrow minded they can see through a keyhole with both eyes.

It is not about society anymore; it is about self-gratification. One prime example of this that recently read…Lauren Boebert, in 1.5 years, is worth 41 million dollars and has done absolutely nothing for her district prior to the last-minute introduction of a possible bill to revamp Glenwood Canyon. That of course is true to form for the fix is to put the traffic burden on the smaller highways that are not built to take it. There is a pattern of the lesser taking the bulk of the load and it will get worse.

The money unleashed by the Citizen’s United ruling leads directly to this outcome and what we are witnessing now with the SCOTUS is the ultimate control of our government even though over 65% of Americans support a women’s right to choose. Turkey became authoritarian when a few with money began to control the courts. Refusing to allow for a Supreme Court Justice hearing and confirmation in 2015 was money talking to McConnell and in part his own; as the court goes, so goes the control and Alito has been happy to oblige one leading to another.

Money already finds no path to the poor. Sure, they get some welfare, which most really don’t want, but with kids and only part-time jobs available it is a matter of survival. So why is it we want to saddle them with MORE kids they can’t care for? It will equal more dropouts, more jobless, lack of skills and no one wins. It is easy to say women shouldn’t have that right, but will they make provisions for the working poor and medically challenged? Will we be able to keep up? Then, in this mix is the fact that the religious right wants to take away birth control, the only path other than abstinence women have to curb unwanted births. At what point will they realize they will continue to add to societies woes? Perhaps never as they are the controllers; wasn’t that what George Orwell called them?

The issues of abortion or not will never be over in the minds of many but this destruction of court precedence will continue and better get the attention of all of you. The dark money has likely swayed the court, there will soon be money thrown at the term limits of public officials and that well find it’s way to the Presidency of this once great country. This decision coupled with Citizens United will stretch so far that it will strangle us all. This is NOT simply a case about abortion. None of us should be cheering the demise of a case set in precedence and the probable use of money to overturn it.