Sweet land of liberty

Happy Independence Day.

Between the 4th of July and the Republican primary campaign and anti-tax posturing in general, "freedom" has gotten a lot of lip service lately.

But I don't know what it means, really. What do they mean when they say it? Freedom for the powerful to do as they please at the expense of everyone else?

Meanwhile, everyone-else is seeing their dreams for their own life recede farther and farther out of reach. Or they don't dream anymore, they just try to make it through each week without a disaster, putting out one little brush-fire after another, choosing between new shoes for their quickly-growing kids or keeping the power on, between $$ they don't have each month for reliable birth control or the odds of $$$$ down the road for an abortion. Meanwhile, I almost hope everyone's abortion lottery-number comes up sooner rather than later, because the possibility of getting a needed abortion a few years from now is looking dimmer and dimmer and dimmer.

We exploded bright beautiful fireworks. Huge ones, the real kind. For one day I didn't think about the $$$ that they cost, which we could have put toward everyone's abortion. Probably I should have.

Certain people talk "freedom" but also want to make abortion impossible. They have never explained: If the law were to abide that our very bodies be subjugated to the demands of another entity -- fetus, man or whoever -- then how could we ever be free? How could the remaining liberties mean anything? And if only some are free, is there such thing as justice?

Here in Abortionland these days, temporary injunctions have become our way of making it through each week narrowly staving off disaster, the blanket on these brush-fires that can't be doused, because actually the powerful were pouring gasoline. My feeling is that this year's long parade of anti-freedom legislation is just a way to distract from the total void where economic redress was promised, and to distract from the ever-yawning divide between the powerful and everyone else. Meanwhile, everyone-else is more and more disempowered, with our freedom, supposedly inalienable, actually increasingly contingent on disaster staying at bay, on the odds landing on some other poor bastard and not us.

Where's our revolutionary spirit when we really need it?