Forms of exhaustion abound in the people who have been standing up to (paying attention to) the systemic, legalized cruelty of some of our leaders during the pandemic.
Two thoughts come about this exhaustion.
One: That a good deal of the transgressions we are living through and are witnessing cause moral injuries. These transgressions are actions and positions that we had thought were beyond the pale, that no civilized, reasonable, people, would ever do those things. But we are far past the belief that we have shared standards of decency, and honesty. When we watch people with political power, such as our former president, and current governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, lie to their people and mandate policies which undoubtedly result in deaths during this pandemic.
Those of us who watch the news, or read newspapers have no doubt that people are and have been dying because of the policies of some leaders during the pandemic.
Aside from the horrific number of deaths caused, the stressing of our medical system, and many other quantifiable effects, invisible damage is also done. I call this invisible harm a moral injury. It is a moral injury to see wrong being done, legally, in an ongoing way. And to not see enough being done to stop it.
Moral injuries unbalance our sense that the world we live in is basically good. They bruise our trust that we will continue as a “good enough” nation.
Two: Those people in power, like our former president and the two governors mentioned above, who made certain that some of the people whom they govern would die and will die, those ones who are causing moral injury, are holding the people of their states, and all the rest of us Americans who are witnesses to this, under a moral siege.
A siege is a strategy of war.
Laying siege is a starving and exhausting of a trapped population, over time. The trapped people are forced through fear and deprivation to capitulate or surrender.
This moral siege is intended to demonstrate the power and intentions of those leaders. And it is also meant to discourage those being led by them, from believing that their leaders care about their well-being.
What I am calling moral injury and moral siege are not new to our country. Indigenous peoples and people of color, as well as women of every color, know moral injury and moral siege intimately.
I am never so exalted as when I am persecuted, or similar words to that effect. Roe vs Wade is one of the most important generational markers in the fight for human rights, but it isn’t the only one, and many of us were born into a world without it. Last night I watched a documentary on “1917”, the darkest year of World War One. Multiply the number of Covid deaths by five or six, and you have the casualty numbers for just that year of the war. Get the cameras off of Manchin and help Stacey Abrams win; increase our margin in the House and Senate; refuse to be drawn in to fear, intimidation, and retaliation: these are actions to which I can dedicate myself. We shall overcome.
I believe the Supreme Court of the United States of the 21st century is dismantling democracy itself.
Three things:
1. Citizens United amendment making money "free speech" making it legalized bribery to buy our elected officials. They are now voting 95% of the time with their donors not their constituents.
2. The 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights act that they decided was not necessary any more. In particular taking out the pre-clearance clause giving states carte blanche to suppress voters and gerrymander the districts to the hilt. States rights are not absolute even for the originalists of the Constitution who gave Congress the right to curb rogue state taking away voting rights.
3. This ruling taking away women's rights and installing the supremacy of states rights and super majority legislatures to install autocracy over EXISTING Constitutional Rights. That they are taking away rights based on a future reading of the law is abhorrent. That the rule of law is also obliterated and replaced by vigilante injustice means all rights are at stake.
The Supreme Court is illegitimate because of then Majority leader McConnell's double shenanigans first refusing to even hear the Merrick Garland nomination a year from the election and then pushing through the nomination of Amy Barrett even after early voting had started. If there hadn't been contempt of the Constitution by Grim Reaper McConnell, who has been bought by monied interests, we wouldn't have a super majority far right court.
I'll go further and say both Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas should be recused on any law involving women's rights since they have been credibly accused of violating women's rights although justice has never been served on them.
So, I'm looking to see if impeachment is a tool Congress (which is so corrupt) could use to pull the Supreme Court back from destroying democracy and having them enforce the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution saying it is guaranteed that all states must have a republican form of government, i.e. represented by the people. Adding more seats to the Court is at best a kluggy temporary fix. The answer may be in terms limits when each member of the court gets a nine year term and one rotates off the court each year.
For now, we have an illegitimate Supreme Court in Contempt of the Constitution and set on destroying democracy altogether. I'm going to write to Justice Sotomayor and Chief Justice Roberts about this. They have staff that read all letters sent them. Here's how: https://legalbeagle.com/5704017-write-supreme-court-justices.html Time to remove the stench of the current rogue court. We the People, all of us this time!
I'm close enough to my end of days, that I have stopped thinking in terms of seeing or participating in a nation where all women have the rights to their own bodies. Instead I take great hope in a generation of women who have never lived before RvW and have come to expect their reproductive rights. These women (and men) will fight hard to protect what they have come to take for granted. It is far easier to deny rights people have not yet experienced, than to take them away after those rights have been established. People don't like change. When changes come to reproductive rights, this next generation will fight back. I trust our future to them. We must encourage and teach these strong young people and support them every way we can.
I think the point that Manchin voted for the defense budget with no concerns about inflation and yet is holding up Build Back Better on that premise is such an important point to keep in the public eye. I also appreciate the consistently positive messaging we receive on the Hubbell newsletter - we have to take a long view to achieve progressive change. Demoralization is our enemy. I also want to say as a subscriber that I did not receive my newsletter today in my email feed but instead had to google the newsletter in order to access it. Please put me back on distribution as I just subscribed in the past few months and read your newsletter first thing every AM as it appears in my email.
Having lived through the time before Roe vs. Wade, I suspect the same thing will happen now with women's reproductive health. There will be an underground movement to help women in their need. At least now there are better means of helping women than the wire coat hanger. Drugs are easy to conceal, and the main thing you have to worry about is sharp-eyed, nosy Republican neighbors.
Can't agree with you that Justice Gorsuch's dissent was "well said." He was just wrong. The courts have long held that religious objections cannot overcome the need of the public at large for protection against deadly infectious diseases. There is no organized religion--not Christian Science, not the Seventh Day Adventists, none--that opposes the coronavirus vaccine. Particularly for those in public health, there simply is no right to threaten the lives of others through a preventable infectious disease. If you feel that you have that right, find another line of work. As for the Fourteenth Amendment, as we have discussed, the forces of darkness are trying to repeal it though the courts.
I am hoping that between voter suppression and the attack on reproductive Health there will be so many angry people of color and women who will get out to vote just because they are so angry. And we can’t forget those who are not people of color and women who are still angry because of these issues and will hopefully turn out to vote in droves.
Lyndon would have said “You are right Senator Manchin. And I am going to close or move all the federal offices in SC to keep that inflation under control “
Robert- Sorry, I'm terse to fault. My point was, I don't foresee a long runway for our democracy. We like to think that it was ordained by god, but I don't think it is going to be the first civilization/culture/nation to persist. We are finding out that democracy requires a certain amount of knowledge, long-term thinking and, maybe above all, cooperation. These things are in short supply these days and I see that only getting worse. Most liberals try to see around the corner and plan for our the benefit of our descendants but it will take a preponderance of the population to move the ball at all. (so much for my being terse)
This is exhausting, but the more creepy the insurrection information and the attacks on Roe vs Wade become, the more disgusted I become at the thought of having self-righteous and corrupt bullies trying to boss us around. Attacks on the Capitol and legislators are criminal. Depriving women of proper and private healthcare and choice in childbearing is, in my mind, both criminal and sadistic.
Forms of exhaustion abound in the people who have been standing up to (paying attention to) the systemic, legalized cruelty of some of our leaders during the pandemic.
Two thoughts come about this exhaustion.
One: That a good deal of the transgressions we are living through and are witnessing cause moral injuries. These transgressions are actions and positions that we had thought were beyond the pale, that no civilized, reasonable, people, would ever do those things. But we are far past the belief that we have shared standards of decency, and honesty. When we watch people with political power, such as our former president, and current governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, lie to their people and mandate policies which undoubtedly result in deaths during this pandemic.
Those of us who watch the news, or read newspapers have no doubt that people are and have been dying because of the policies of some leaders during the pandemic.
Aside from the horrific number of deaths caused, the stressing of our medical system, and many other quantifiable effects, invisible damage is also done. I call this invisible harm a moral injury. It is a moral injury to see wrong being done, legally, in an ongoing way. And to not see enough being done to stop it.
Moral injuries unbalance our sense that the world we live in is basically good. They bruise our trust that we will continue as a “good enough” nation.
Two: Those people in power, like our former president and the two governors mentioned above, who made certain that some of the people whom they govern would die and will die, those ones who are causing moral injury, are holding the people of their states, and all the rest of us Americans who are witnesses to this, under a moral siege.
A siege is a strategy of war.
Laying siege is a starving and exhausting of a trapped population, over time. The trapped people are forced through fear and deprivation to capitulate or surrender.
This moral siege is intended to demonstrate the power and intentions of those leaders. And it is also meant to discourage those being led by them, from believing that their leaders care about their well-being.
What I am calling moral injury and moral siege are not new to our country. Indigenous peoples and people of color, as well as women of every color, know moral injury and moral siege intimately.
I am never so exalted as when I am persecuted, or similar words to that effect. Roe vs Wade is one of the most important generational markers in the fight for human rights, but it isn’t the only one, and many of us were born into a world without it. Last night I watched a documentary on “1917”, the darkest year of World War One. Multiply the number of Covid deaths by five or six, and you have the casualty numbers for just that year of the war. Get the cameras off of Manchin and help Stacey Abrams win; increase our margin in the House and Senate; refuse to be drawn in to fear, intimidation, and retaliation: these are actions to which I can dedicate myself. We shall overcome.
I believe the Supreme Court of the United States of the 21st century is dismantling democracy itself.
Three things:
1. Citizens United amendment making money "free speech" making it legalized bribery to buy our elected officials. They are now voting 95% of the time with their donors not their constituents.
2. The 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights act that they decided was not necessary any more. In particular taking out the pre-clearance clause giving states carte blanche to suppress voters and gerrymander the districts to the hilt. States rights are not absolute even for the originalists of the Constitution who gave Congress the right to curb rogue state taking away voting rights.
3. This ruling taking away women's rights and installing the supremacy of states rights and super majority legislatures to install autocracy over EXISTING Constitutional Rights. That they are taking away rights based on a future reading of the law is abhorrent. That the rule of law is also obliterated and replaced by vigilante injustice means all rights are at stake.
The Supreme Court is illegitimate because of then Majority leader McConnell's double shenanigans first refusing to even hear the Merrick Garland nomination a year from the election and then pushing through the nomination of Amy Barrett even after early voting had started. If there hadn't been contempt of the Constitution by Grim Reaper McConnell, who has been bought by monied interests, we wouldn't have a super majority far right court.
I'll go further and say both Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas should be recused on any law involving women's rights since they have been credibly accused of violating women's rights although justice has never been served on them.
So, I'm looking to see if impeachment is a tool Congress (which is so corrupt) could use to pull the Supreme Court back from destroying democracy and having them enforce the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution saying it is guaranteed that all states must have a republican form of government, i.e. represented by the people. Adding more seats to the Court is at best a kluggy temporary fix. The answer may be in terms limits when each member of the court gets a nine year term and one rotates off the court each year.
For now, we have an illegitimate Supreme Court in Contempt of the Constitution and set on destroying democracy altogether. I'm going to write to Justice Sotomayor and Chief Justice Roberts about this. They have staff that read all letters sent them. Here's how: https://legalbeagle.com/5704017-write-supreme-court-justices.html Time to remove the stench of the current rogue court. We the People, all of us this time!
I'm close enough to my end of days, that I have stopped thinking in terms of seeing or participating in a nation where all women have the rights to their own bodies. Instead I take great hope in a generation of women who have never lived before RvW and have come to expect their reproductive rights. These women (and men) will fight hard to protect what they have come to take for granted. It is far easier to deny rights people have not yet experienced, than to take them away after those rights have been established. People don't like change. When changes come to reproductive rights, this next generation will fight back. I trust our future to them. We must encourage and teach these strong young people and support them every way we can.
I think the point that Manchin voted for the defense budget with no concerns about inflation and yet is holding up Build Back Better on that premise is such an important point to keep in the public eye. I also appreciate the consistently positive messaging we receive on the Hubbell newsletter - we have to take a long view to achieve progressive change. Demoralization is our enemy. I also want to say as a subscriber that I did not receive my newsletter today in my email feed but instead had to google the newsletter in order to access it. Please put me back on distribution as I just subscribed in the past few months and read your newsletter first thing every AM as it appears in my email.
Having lived through the time before Roe vs. Wade, I suspect the same thing will happen now with women's reproductive health. There will be an underground movement to help women in their need. At least now there are better means of helping women than the wire coat hanger. Drugs are easy to conceal, and the main thing you have to worry about is sharp-eyed, nosy Republican neighbors.
Can't agree with you that Justice Gorsuch's dissent was "well said." He was just wrong. The courts have long held that religious objections cannot overcome the need of the public at large for protection against deadly infectious diseases. There is no organized religion--not Christian Science, not the Seventh Day Adventists, none--that opposes the coronavirus vaccine. Particularly for those in public health, there simply is no right to threaten the lives of others through a preventable infectious disease. If you feel that you have that right, find another line of work. As for the Fourteenth Amendment, as we have discussed, the forces of darkness are trying to repeal it though the courts.
I am hoping that between voter suppression and the attack on reproductive Health there will be so many angry people of color and women who will get out to vote just because they are so angry. And we can’t forget those who are not people of color and women who are still angry because of these issues and will hopefully turn out to vote in droves.
Lyndon would have said “You are right Senator Manchin. And I am going to close or move all the federal offices in SC to keep that inflation under control “
Robert- Sorry, I'm terse to fault. My point was, I don't foresee a long runway for our democracy. We like to think that it was ordained by god, but I don't think it is going to be the first civilization/culture/nation to persist. We are finding out that democracy requires a certain amount of knowledge, long-term thinking and, maybe above all, cooperation. These things are in short supply these days and I see that only getting worse. Most liberals try to see around the corner and plan for our the benefit of our descendants but it will take a preponderance of the population to move the ball at all. (so much for my being terse)
This is exhausting, but the more creepy the insurrection information and the attacks on Roe vs Wade become, the more disgusted I become at the thought of having self-righteous and corrupt bullies trying to boss us around. Attacks on the Capitol and legislators are criminal. Depriving women of proper and private healthcare and choice in childbearing is, in my mind, both criminal and sadistic.
Sadly, the number of "new generations Americans" is a small and shrinking number. Lets be realistic.