Fasten Your Seatbelts

If you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?

This post may lose me followers, but I feel compelled to answer the prompt honestly. This has been a hot button issue ever since I was in grade school when I heard about the topic incessantly, which desensitized me to it, and then led me to decide on my own, without the input of the Catholic Church or other religious leaders.

My title for today of course comes from the film All About Eve, so if I may complete the quotation, with a slight paraphrase, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy read.”

If I had the mystical power cited in the prompt, I’d restore Roe v. Wade. It’s not about abortion or murdering babies or upholding religious beliefs. It’s about the quality of life for the newborns—which most Pro-Lifers don’t seem to care about; once the fetus is born, it’s no longer of any consequence. Forget WIC, healthcare, or proper education, just let those babies be born, so we have an adequate number of targets for school shootings.

Yes, that’s pretty cynical and a bit inflammatory, but it sounds true, doesn’t it? Forget the child, just push your political/religious agenda (which the Constitution says to separate, no?), which incidentally is just the start of further control that leads us to the real-life manifestation of Margaret Atwood’s fictional Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale.

You have to have that fascist dictatorship to enforce those kinds of ideas, by the way. You can’t possibly allow voters the chance to reverse one of your mandates. The method for that level of control has to be at gunpoint. Because people might eventually realize that control does not lead to a healthy society, but rather a sick one that uses women and children as pawns to advance an authoritarian agenda.*

And I, for one, refuse to live in Gilead.

---

* I’ve often questioned what their endgame is. Is it power just for power’s sake? From what I have seen on TV, usually with cartel leaders living in a compound guarded by men with machine guns, these are the wealthy enjoying the fruits of their money but—given the level of protective firepower—at the same time fearing for the lives of themselves and their families and children. Do they not realize that, when people have nothing left to lose, they will revolt? Can they enjoy their rule (and destroy the planet) enough before that happens?