Ask Me About Abortion Anger

Agreeing to disagree? Well, those word play days are done. Irretrievably done.

“You seem quite hostile.” “I gotta right to be hostile. My people been persecuted!” (All credit due Public Enemy)

There was a woman named Kay. A long time family friend, Kay was a large woman whose size belied her reserved and retiring manner. Kay’s husband, though fittingly small and Jack Sprat spry in stature — Jack Sprat could eat no fat/His wife could eat no lean/And so between them both, you see/They licked the platter clean — was a martinet. The kind of cat who wanted his dinner, the one he himself had not cooked, on time and wouldn’t brook with it not being so.

Kay and her husband lived a relatively uneventful life in The Bronx and if anyone ever heard Kay say anything it was usually nothing more than “yes, dear” or “I don’t know dear” while her husband chattered away about this and that. They both worked city jobs and you could assume that Kay wasn't markedly different at work. Which is to say there were no surprises to Kay’s affect. She was just…Kay.

Until one day. One day she wasn’t.

And that was the day that Kay’s husband realized that being married to a woman six inches taller than him and about 50 pounds heavier could be a problem. Because, you see, that was the day that Kay set about KILLING her husband. No Lucrezia Borgia, using nothing as subtle as poison for the meals she so painstakingly prepared, Kay didn’t even use a force equalizer like a hammer or a knife. Kay would introduce him to the minus column using nothing fancier than her bare hands.

The neighbors heard his screams but even more than that the neighbors heard HER screams. The voiceless, you see, had finally found their voice and Kay’s rumble and rage was a “fuck you” for the ages. Every dinner, every “yes dear” compacted into a vocal explosion that caused any and everyone who heard it to, at least in this instance, alert the world that death had come to The Bronx.

And for the first time he listened to her, since it was pretty clear that, on a certain level his life depended on it.

When the police had kicked in the door Kay’s husband was near dead and it took five adult men to pull Kay off of him. Amazingly, for the 1950s, they didn’t throw Kay in jail. A determination had been made that she had had a nervous breakdown and suffered a “temporary” leave of her senses. She was placed in a mental institution where she remained for about a month.

During that month away everyone had a chance to do a lot of thinking and on her release there was no one to pick her up but her husband. And for the first time he listened to her, since it was pretty clear that, on a certain level his life depended on it. However, he claimed, he loved her, didn’t want a divorce and they could, and would, make this work.

And it did. But old ways die hard and it wasn’t much more than a month after that that the old order had returned: Kay taking the shots that her husband had called. They had all returned. Returned and stayed until about 10 months later when Kay lost it again. In fact, not only did Kay lose it again, Kay then began to do so…every year. Like clockwork.

So regular that it had become a family joke in my family since clearly Kay’s husband factored this into how much he was willing to pay for the other 10 months of kowtowing assent. It was a bargain he had struck and it was one that they stuck to. I guess it kind of worked for both of them.

As I got older the story that had given me so much secret joy, a Travis Bickle-esque “here is a person who would not take it anymore joy”, had started to curdle and I found myself wishing, in my darker moments, that Kay had really and finally, truly, killed her husband.

I tell you this story for one reason and one reason only: despite all this hoo-hah about State’s Rights and the lack of need for federal protections for health care options for women, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade comes as close to a straw-and-camel’s-back moment as we’re likely to have.

As tough as it is to stomach the execrable statistics when it comes to RAPE that shows that, at least in America, a woman is raped every ONE TO TWO MINUTES (which lets you do the math: how many women have been raped while you’ve been reading this?), the conviction rates for arrested rapists? Woefully inadequate. And tough to stomach. But the fact that now if you’re a woman AND you’ve been raped in, say, the last one to two minutes, you must carry that pregnancy to full term.

So, if you’re a woman while you might have suspected that men don’t give a fuck about you…you now know: they don’t.

No ifs. No ands. No buts.

So, if you’re a woman while you might have suspected that men don’t give a fuck about you, along with swaths of other women who have found common cause with them usually via organized religion, you now know: they don’t. Like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Roman Polanski, Benjamin Roethlisberger, Greg Hardy, Conor McGregor, Matt Gaetz, Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Woody Allen, Donald Trump and…well, you get the idea…like all of this wasn’t enough now you know. Really. And truly.

How much so? So much so that the Supreme Court justices who made this possible, during their confirmation hearings LIED about their willingness to make it possible. Without fear of sanction, these lifetime appointees promised that they would not come inside you and then, very clearly, came inside you. And today, to quote the benighted President Ulysses S. Grant who once was quoted as saying, “I’ve been fucked. And I can feel it,” you/we can now? Feel it.

And when I say “we” I’m being generous since no one will feel this like THE WOMEN who live in states where this will actively and immediately answer this call to deny them health care.

None of which should be a surprise to any of us even if it’s always a surprise when shitty people do shitty things. However, let’s keep the surprise for that Kay moment. That moment when, like being shot through the head with a diamond, to mangle a Milius line, action, activity and outcome coalesce into a reasonably made decision to flip the fuck out.

No more dinners, no more sexy time, no more yes y’all’ing, no more “hope” and the more active but even less effective “hoping”, no more suffering fools. It’s total war and the solution from here on out is simple: fight or die fighting. This is not hyperbole. This is, as things stand, reality now.

Plan accordingly.