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Wanting the government to help people is free

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Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

I took the commuter train into the city for the first time since I’ve lived out here and it deposited me into the middle of North Station where I almost immediately got turned around somehow trying to find the subway. It struck me how quickly the internal map we keep inside of us for navigating a familiar place can degrade. It probably doesn’t help that every time I go back to Boston now there are so many new big buildings that have sprung up out of nowhere that throw off my ability to navigate via landmarks. I’m like a bird flying into its own reflection in a glass window furious and confused at once.

After I got my bearings I walked upstream of the crowds heading toward the Garden for the Celtics game and trudged up the backside of Beacon Hill along the impossibly cute “Boston” streets the type of streets you would use as a location to film a TV show if you wanted to give the impression that a city was quaint and old and everything was always basically fine there.

Around the back of the State House I could hear the roar of a crowd reverberating and it was thrilling and put a little extra something in my limping gait. It’s always like this for me when I’m arriving at a protest like you never know how big it’s going to be and you're sort of nervous so here was my answer in the form of sound.

In front of the steps of the building there was a crowd that could have been five hundred and could have been a thousand people holding signs and listening to speakers and chanting. Pro life is a lie. You don't care if women die. That sort of thing.

This may have been adding to the air of uncanniness I felt about being in the city here but I am pretty sure that in front of the State House which is apparently under construction they have hung a giant banner picture of the State House. I guess so we know it's still there (?)

Some of the crowd seemed angry and determined and some seemed shell-shocked like they were still processing what the fuck was happening and both of those seem like two of the correct reactions to me.

“The struggle for reproductive freedom must openly confront racism and poverty to ensure that we all have reproductive freedom,” a speaker named Rachel Domond of the Boston Liberation Center said and that is of course a key aspect of all of this isn’t it. Wealthy people will always be able to get an abortion when they need one. Black women and poorer women who are already often subjected to disparities in the quality of the healthcare they receive even under “normal” circumstances won’t be so lucky.  

“The federal right to abortion has not yet been revoked, but this majority opinion tells us that the fight-back is yet to come,” she went on. “We need to be in the streets fighting. We can’t wait until the day that it is overturned. And we have to call this attack exactly what it is. It’s a war on women.”

Biden on the other seems content to wait and to let things play out a little while longer before actually doing anything that could solve the problem like abolishing the filibuster or packing the court or actually kicking some of the members of his party in the fucking ass to get them to fall in line.

Ok cool let us know later then no worries mate.

I was told that the reason we had to vote for Biden was because of his ability to reach across the aisle and get Republicans to come to their senses via his powers of folksiness but he can’t even get two obviously corrupt and compromised members of his own party in the Senate to stop spitting in his face and wiping their gilded assholes with his agenda every second of every day.

Meanwhile here’s the actual chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee telling us to simply vote harder.  

This fucking guy. It’s not about the things that we the people you voted for aren’t doing right now to help you it’s about how you need to do better by us next time so we can spend more time in office not doing things to help you.

Right now as we speak Jim Clyburn the House Majority Whip the guy who is in theory supposed to get party members in order is campaigning for an anti-choice Rep. in Texas. I'm going to fucking lose my mind.

The reason is of course because Cuellar's challenger Jessica Cisneros is primarying him from the left and Democrats always get their fucking asses into gear when it comes to fighting in that direction.

Top Democrats may not be up for a fight when it comes to codifying abortion rights into law but the folks gathered outside the State House and normal people everywhere around the country seem to be.

“Democrats have used abortion as a campaign talking point for decades, and yet they haven’t done anything to actually codify Roe,” a speaker named Claire Grossi said. “Democrats stood on the sidelines for years while right wing Republicans have launched attack after attack.”

“We cannot rely on the courts and we cannot rely on the Democratic party to defend our rights, we can rely only on ourselves.”

“We have an unelected body of nine individuals who think that they have the right to revoke gains that were made by women, working class people fighting in the streets," a speaker named Gabby Ballard with the Party for Socialism and Liberation said.  

Another speaker named Mandy Wilkens echoed that point that it’s always the people coming together that results in any progress.

“It took a mass movement to get gay marriage. It took a mass movement to get Derek Chauvin convicted. It’s going to take a mass movement to get trans rights and it’s going to take a mass movement to get abortion rights codified into law. This isn’t going to happen unless we stand together. United we win, divided we fall.”

Do whatever you want with your money I suppose but if you want my opinion please do not waste it on Democrats at the moment. Instead consider giving to one of the local abortion funds you can find in this very comprehensive document here.

One thing that I can't stop thinking about is how self-evidently obvious a lie it is to pretend any of this is about concern for the lives of mothers and children. This is cliche but these people care about a fetus up until the moment of conception at which point it's like fuck you good luck out there you're gonna need it.

Never mind how much of a financial burden it is in this country to simply give birth in the first place. As I've written in here before having a child in America is considered a sickness. And we all know how well we treat sick people.

In this country, new parents are often forced to cobble together a hodgepodge of vacation or sick days to spend any time with their newborn. If they even can.

Companies with 50 or more employees can't fire someone for taking up to 12 weeks off to be with their newborn—whether it's a man or a woman—thanks to the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. But these companies don't have to pay them for the time off (though some generous employers do). Last year, only 13 percent of workers received part of their paycheck in a period following a childbirth; that number dropped to 7 percent in fields like the service industry or retail, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics

That gives the U.S. the dubious distinction of being one of the few countries in the world—not just rich countries, but countries altogether—that does not have any sort of paid parental leave law at the federal level.

So now we're going to force you to give birth then we're going to saddle you with immense debt for the procedure then we're not going to give you any time off from work after the birth and instead we're going to spend all of the money on buying the police fancier equipment to kill you with.

It's so expensive just to live. It's so fucking expensive to live!!! What are we doing here? I mean it. What are we doing?