To Fight That Much Harder
It feels like the world is ending — and, for a time, it is.
The structures we built to support and enable people to live the lives that they want, especially around children and bodily autonomy and gender presentation, are crumbling, having been reluctantly constructed in the first place.
Our opponents believe that they are the sole inheritors of a state designed for their exclusive benefit. The United States is not a messy experiment with a moral paradox at its core; it is a divinely-inspired paradise for all the white men in the world who weren’t born royal. For it to function, humanity must begin and end with the demographic of the Constitutional Convention.
This, they insist, is the true core of the document that emerged in 1787, and not the open and difficult compromises of men who knew that they must share power with each other or collapse into anarchy. Our opponents object to every note in the margins of our Constitution, every argument in their own words, every escape hatch and procedure that asks us to improve upon their failures. Instead of seeking a more perfect union, we must treat the biases and hierarchy of an 18th century settler colonial state as sacrosanct. To change is to damage their perfection.
This has been the eternal fight of the republic: To unmake the hypocrisy of our founding, or to revel in it.
There were so many great options in the path to becoming the United States: so many chances for recompense and righteousness, dignity and respect, where we could have had a nation forged from a break with the systems of the past and a new world of lived principles. That we didn’t take enough of those options when offered to us is the reason we are here today, still fighting the war for human dignity, and seeing an army amassed on the other side.
In some ways, these warriors are literal, and in others, they are figurative, but they are willing to use any lever they have to assert control over the multiracial majority. They keep their arsenal stocked with bullying, harassment, public humiliation, threats, intimidation, and yes, acts of terrorism. And the more power threatens to slip from their grasp, the more often these events occur.
The power-seeking shenanigans of these culture warriors have produced a Supreme Court of Doctrine, not law, and we have received their most recent diktat of the faith today: Women are not equal.
Everything that flows from that idea poisons everyone who is gender-marginalized. For those of us who can give birth, we are bound to our fertility; for those of us who cannot, we are forced to neatly partition into predator or prey. Our imagination for ourselves? Wiped out by the obligations of patriarchy: sit down; shut up, and breed.
We have been here before, and recently too. We have seen the damage, and the survivors have reminded us of the costs. It will be unbearable, unspeakable. We will never truly know the toll of what we will lose. This decision is an abomination, and so is any institution that could produce such a thing.
They have condemned us to a broken and terrible world — unless we change it.
There is a dormant Constitutional amendment — the Equal Rights Amendment — that could go for a full vote with a simple majority in the United States Senate agreeing to it. Let’s put it at the heart of a midterm campaign, and turn out every parent who had to go without formula, every adult child who couldn’t take time to care for aging parents, every young person who knows that it’s best to get fundamental rights in writing. Let’s ask how we can live in an age of record-breaking profits, but still not be able to afford paid family leave or enough sick days to endure the pandemic. Let’s talk about what our institutions are supposed to do and whom they are supposed to represent, and why they have drifted so far from consensus in a country where supermajorities disagree with six, unelected magistrates’ interpretation of our collective power sharing agreement.
We are in a fight for the potential of this country. We are battling over whether we will have an answer to climate change or will succumb to it; whether we will move toward equality or abandon ourselves to supremacy; whether we will continue to seek that more perfect union, or cease to be a union at all.
Heretofore, the leadership of the only viable political party has shied away from embracing these stakes. Their fear is well-founded, as every push forward has met with a brutal and unrelenting backlash. But their strategy of avoidance has failed. It has given comfort and succor to the petty tyrants among us, and left us, their imagined subjects, isolated and vulnerable.
It is simply time to stop running and take a stand. We do not need to be afraid of these bullies; we outnumber them — and how. We are the new silent majority, and we are ready and willing to counterpunch if only you ask us to.
Around us, the forces of the status quo froth up our anxieties about this majoritarian power possibly running amok, doing more damage than the present paradigm ever has. And to this, I say: Prove it.
For centuries, we have been warned against the consequences of human rights, and never has the catastrophe come due. Confederates wrote elaborate apocalypse fan fiction about what would happen if enslaved people became free, and the greatest share of violence was theirs against us. Men raged at the idea of women voting, and yet found their assistance essential in shaping the unprecedented prosperity of the 20th century. Every step we have taken towards openness and acceptance has yielded an incredible bounty of talent to appreciate and accomplishments to share. Trapping Katherine Johnson on a plantation never gets us to the moon; sticking her under segregation probably kept us from Mars.
No, what has consistently hurt us and held us back is the nostalgia and ahistorical longing for the world that was. We are yoked to the rancid dreams of the people who have spent decades trying to make the country and its possibilities smaller, and this is what we have to show for it. Carrying the weight of their limitations, the progress of our age can barely move beyond a crawl.
It is not fair, perhaps, that we must fight them to have a chance at a future, but it is necessary. The cold truth is that they will not stop fighting us. Fighting to shove us back in the closet, fight to make us accept less and give more, fighting to force hierarchy upon the natural equality provided by birth. We have developed tremendous armor, but we cannot take every blow indefinitely.
So they have struck us deeply today, and it hurts. But in our agony, in our rage, we know something they do not: We are capable of striking back.
After all, it is the inevitability of our victory that they have been fighting all along.
