The End of Technology

A snappy title for what may be an old-man rant. Judge for yourselves.

A week ago or so, we bought a new television. We bought the old one when we moved into a new house in Fort Collins, back in 2012. That 10-year-old television works just fine, except that the streaming services have been fucking about with their systems, and suddenly, there are bunch of formerly-free services that are pay-per-view (in one form or another) and their software is completely incompatible with “old technology.”

They call it “anti-piracy,” but I don’t think that word means what they think it means.

So I plug in the brand-new television, and it kinda works, but Netflix won’t allow me to play anything except Constantine (with Keanu Reeves) which is, frankly, not a very good movie. I go through two lengthy troubleshooting sessions on the phone, complete with remote service connection from a tech. Turns out, Netflix tweaked their “anti-piracy” software, and it is suddenly incompatible with God alone knows how many televisions, including (unfortunately) the one that still stinks of the packing materials in our house.

Quicklist: Types of Television

  1. Quantum Light-Emitting Diode
  2. Organic Light-Emitting Diode
  3. Light-Emitting Diode
  4. Liquid-Crystal Display
  5. Digital Light Processing
  6. Plasma Panels
  7. Direct View

Consumer Reports currently recommends 82 different models of television, and put 59 more into the “Yeah, not so much” category. That’s 141 “choices” to cycle through, featuring some random distribution of the seven different types of television listed above. Which of these are compatible with Netflix? And also with Amazon? Which is available at a good price at Costco? Do I want motion-smoothing? Is color saturation important? What about the Hip-Hop-Foo-Maroo option?

God Himself gave up on all this some time back and started designing a new universe that doesn’t support television.

I talked it over with my wife, and we’re taking the new television back, and reconnecting the old one. And if, in the end, I can only use it to play Skyrim with my old XBox-360, then so be it. It’s my Big Screen Skyrim machine. Or maybe we’ll just dump it and repurpose an entire room.

Imagine that.

I also tried to make an adjustment to my retirement plan this weekend. I’m not talking about tweaking investment accounts. I’m talking about the personal model I’ve put together for how the fuck we will keep the rain off our heads and food in the refrigerator for another 20-30 years, until we finally stop making choices and die.

I will be blunt: the mathematical model I put together for a heavy-ion accelerator back in graduate school was simpler.

Back in 1970, when I was in High School, I read a book called Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. It made a huge impression on me at the time, and one of his concepts was the problem of “overchoice.” Overchoice is a fragmentation of standard (or even substandard) life-choices into a lot of frivolous distinctions based on “market differentiation,” which can cause people to obsess over which is “better.”

When I was a lad, there was Ford and Chevy. Same damn cars, but people argued about “quality.” My father was a Ford man, and never bought a Chevy in his life, to my knowledge. A point of pride.

By the 1970’s this had become a major social pathology. Toffler called it “overchoice.” Other terms are “analysis paralysis,” or “information overload,” or “the tyranny of small decisions.” It’s closely related to “buyer’s remorse,” where you finally make a decision, and then start second-guessing whether it was the right decision. Ford or Chevy? Post Toasties or Corn Flakes? OH MY GOD I MADE THE WRONG DECISION I AM GOING TO DIE!

It burns up all the energy we could be putting into economic justice. Or climate change. Or global hunger. Or a normal family life.

Nah. What am I thinking? What’s IMPORTANT is the latest and greatest in Quantum Light Emitting Diodes. Whatever the fuck those are.

Apart from the issue of making us all into drones who spend our lives sorting grains of sand by size, all this overchoice starts to erode functionality. I went to a store today to get a piece of metal to fix a fence latch. At check-out, I encountered an electronic teller that requires that I first put my card in the slot, then select 1 or 2 for credit/debit, then press Enter. It’s one of the last of these dinosaurs in town. So, like everyone else, I stand there wondering why nothing is happening until the teller un-zones and says, “Press Enter” — it’s hard to keep the annoyance out of her voice, she does this all day long — and then I remember I’m in THIS store, and life moves forward. I go to two other stores, and encounter electronic tellers which have a completely different process.

Somewhere, a dozen executives chose one system or the other, and wasted God knows how many hours making the decision. Now they have teller machines everywhere, and can’t afford to re-tool. If they did, it would all change in a year or two, and they’d have to do it again. It gets folded into the cost of their business, and their prices go up.

In the process, the technology starts to diverge at a core level, and machines stop talking to each other. Suddenly, a brand-new television variant doesn’t work with Netflix. A major bank drops support for an old teller machine variant, and a thousand businesses need to upgrade. The upgrade isn’t compatible with old accounting software they’ve been using for years, so they need to spend more money. Some of them go out of business. The entire economy shudders, just a bit.

In space, they call this a Kessler Event, where all of the space trash we’ve dumped in low-earth orbit starts colliding, knocking more stuff out of orbit, until you have the mother of all highway wrecks a few miles above our heads and it comes raining down on us after knocking out all of the satellites we rely on to communicate that there is a shitload of burning metal coming down on our cities.

In my old-man opinion, we’re also headed toward a software Kessler Event.

Solar: So Far, So Good

Since July 11, we’ve now been through securing the financing, inspection of the house and roof, setting up the full (detailed) plan, and submitting the permits to the various permit authorities.

Now, we wait. They say that the shortest permit approval will be one week, more typically four weeks, and commonly six weeks or more. That puts us at the end of September.

Probably good timing. It’s really hot outside right now, and I’d hate to have people up there on our roof.

Should go quickly after that.

Skinwalker Ranch

Tonight, we’re off into the wild blue….

I have a taste for the paranormal. I’ve watched and read enough “paranormal” stories to have a pretty good feel for the trope itself. I started reading about fringe science back before I’d really noticed girls, and that interest has stayed with me right up to the present.

Unfortunately, as I’ve gotten older, and wiser, and more worldly, the trope has worn very thin. Most of the modern “exposés” jump straight to the “it must be extraterrestrials” or “ghosts” or “ancient gods” before the first commercial break, and the stories follow (and follow, and follow) an implausibly disconnected trail of grainy photographs copied from newspapers, pasted on a wall with push-pins and strings and sticky-notes and wide-eyed interviews and … well, let’s not belabor it. These are mostly just really (really) bad television.

I came across something the other night on Netflix, and it caught my eye because it was about the Skinwalker Ranch in Northern Utah. I read a really strange book over a decade ago titled Hunt for the Skinwalker by Kellerher and Knapp, (c) 2005, and this film appeared to be about the same place. So I decided to watch the first episode.

I am now completely hooked.

I’ve done just a little bit of due diligence on this. The format is the “reality television show,” with actors who are allegedly real people doing their thing in front of a camera while assiduously ignoring the existence of the camera filming them: what they call “the fourth wall” in cinematography. These actors are all presented as being real people, and apparently, they are real people. The fellow who takes the spotlight in most episodes is actually an astrophysicist with the University of Alabama, Huntsville, by the name of Dr. Travis S. Taylor. The other scientists are also real scientists with a variety of degrees, and the experts they bring in are real experts. Best of all, they behave like real scientists.

What they are investigating at Skinwalker Ranch is, from a scientific perspective, extremely bizarre, and they seem to appreciate just how bizarre it is, and in just the right way. You can see them regularly getting quietly pissed off at the sheer weirdness of it.

Here’s an example that made my hair stand up in the first (or second) episode: intermittent gamma rays.

A brief diversion here into the science.

Gamma radiation is electromagnetic radiation, just like radio waves, but at a much, much (much) higher frequency. The general rule of electromagnetic radiation is the half-wavelength rule: if you want to detect, or generate, E-M radiation, you need an antenna, or an emitter, about the size of the half-wavelength of the radiation. The old television broadcast wavelengths were between 1 and 10 meters, depending on the channel you were trying to pick up, which resulted in the old-fashioned television aerial you found on every suburban house in the 1950’s, with a range of aluminum rods from a couple of feet, to ten feet or so, to help pick up the different channels (wavelengths). Microwaves use much smaller antennas.

Gamma rays have a wavelength about the size of an atom. So the antennas have to be atom-sized.

There are really only two known sources of gamma rays in nature.

One comes from spontaneous decay of radioactive materials, where the atom basically self-destructs and produces “atomic radiation” (gamma rays). The other comes from one form or another of “atom smashing,” i.e. bombarding materials with a beam of particles or electrons. Sometimes the bombardment actually smashes the atom, and you get gamma rays from the wreckage. In other cases, it captures the incoming particle/electron, then spits it back out whole, and the disturbance produces gamma rays.

There is a lot of atom-smashing going on all the time in outer space, but nearly all of it gets blocked from the Earth’s surface by the ozone layer of the atmosphere. There isn’t much gamma production under the ozone layer, unless you are in a physics lab or deep in a uranium mine. Or somewhere near Fukishima, Japan. There’s a theoretical source of gamma radiation from something called “dark lightning,” which is an electron cascade high in the atmosphere that produces gamma rays. I think they’re still trying to detect that.

That’s pretty much the whole story of gamma rays.

Now, Skinwalker Ranch is on the path of wind-borne radioactive dust and debris from the Nevada nuclear testing in the 1950’s, so in principle, there could be all kinds of radioactive isotopes spread all over the ranch, just under a thin layer of soil, and God alone would know the half-life of some of those isotopes. But the thing about that sort of contamination is that it tends to stay put. You walk into a contaminated area, and you start detecting gamma rays. You walk away, and they fade out (except for maybe your shoes). They don’t arbitrarily change while you are standing there.

In that first episode, they started detecting all kinds of extreme electromagnetic noise, including gamma ray bursts that would appear for a moment, then disappear.

Two things about their reaction to this seemed very authentic.

The first was an expression of WTF disbelief, bordering on being offended. This was particularly true of Travis, who had joined this team with a whole lot of skepticism. Gamma ray bursts offended me, and I could see it on his face, too.

The second was a quick rush for the door.

This runs directly contrary to the traditional paranormal trope. You know, “Don’t go in the basement alone,” or “Don’t recite Latin from an old book while standing in the middle of a pentacle drawn in blood on the floor.” Which — of course — they always go ahead and do anyway. And then all Hell breaks loose. You know the drill.

These guys all booked it out of there.

For context, when I was a graduate student, I worked for a summer in the heavy-ion lab, and they drilled us extensively on safety. Heavy ion experiments are classic atom-smashing. They produce all kinds of noxious radioactive substances, ionizing radiation, and sometimes involve heavy ions from inherently unstable materials, like uranium and plutonium. There are Geiger counters everywhere, required safety courses, and cautionary horror stories.

You just don’t fuck with gamma rays.

After this in the show, they all started wearing personal dosimeters to measure cumulative radiation exposure. This is exactly what real scientists would do. My only critique is that they waited a lot longer than I would have to hire a company to do an environmental sweep. But they did bring in people to do the sweep, and it turned up nothing.

I’m now into season 3.

I cannot say if this is real or not. But, as my son observed, I am really enjoying my suspension of disbelief.

The series is on the History Channel (of all places):

https://www.history.com/shows/the-secret-of-skinwalker-ranch/season-1

We’ve Decided to Go Solar

The time has come.

Two-and-a-half years ago, in November of 2019, we had our first Public Safety Power Shutdown, or PSPS, which lasted for five days. It was interesting to live in a house, in a community, without any electrical power for nearly a week, other than what people cobbled up with generators.

It was long enough to force people to realize how utterly dependent we are on electricity.

There was a huge run on generators right after that, and then people discovered an inconvenient truth. You can’t use your house wiring with a generator. At the very least, you need to completely disconnect from the grid, and for a very good reason: if you don’t, you’re powering the grid with your generator, which has been shut down for a reason. People you don’t even know — like line workers — can get killed by that sort of nonsense.

If you are going to use a personal generator without stringing power cords all over your house, you need to do a full automatic failover system, and those are pricey, noisy, smelly, require maintenance, and run on gasoline, which is going to do nothing but rise in price.

We started seriously looking into the solar option for our home about a month ago, and now that we’ve decided to move forward, I thought I’d start a thread here about the experience, as it develops.

We started with someone we already knew, the wife of a fellow-composer here in the Ukiah area, Carol Cole-Lewis, who sells solar installations as a living with Powur.

One of our first and most urgent questions was based on our neighbor across the street, who’d had solar panels installed, and then found he couldn’t use them because PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric, the regional utility) would not allow him to re-connect his house to the grid after installation unless he disconnected the panels. His system was apparently “not compatible” with the grid. Meaning, he cannot use the panels. They just sit there as a very expensive roof ornament.

Carol’s answer to those questions was that Powur manages the full process, from energy analysis, through ALL permitting, installation and bring-up, and offers a 30-year warranty on the result. They are obligated to provide a legal and working system. I scanned reviews, and they get high marks.

So here’s what we’ve learned, in a nutshell.

  1. We can’t go off-grid. It’s mostly a legal issue involving taxes, zoning, and real-estate, but it’s also a bad idea, because if we get a couple of days of heavy overcast, the battery can’t keep up and we get to hold our own little private PSPS. Break out the candles and the blankets.
  2. Being on-grid means we can buy metered power any time we need to, just like we are doing now. We pay for whatever we use at normal retail rates. With solar, we merely expect to use a lot less.
  3. Any power we consistently over-produce, e.g. during the summer, we get credit for at the full retail rate. This credit can be used to pay for the times we are under-producing, e.g. during the winter.
  4. We can also sell power back to PG&E, but they buy it at wholesale rates, so that’s not significant.
  5. A battery is not absolutely necessary, but it evens out the day/night cycle and allows us to buy a lot less power from PG&E. If we are careful with power usage, we could even continue to have power all the way through an extended PSPS.

So after explaining these broad points, Carol set up an energy plan for us. She asked a lot of questions about the house, asked for pictures of our electrical box, looked up aerial photographs of the house, and so forth. She had a complete plan back to us within two days, and then sat down with us to explain it.

This plan allows us to run at an annual capacity of 125% of our current usage, meaning that by the end of the year, we’ll have produced 25% more electricity than we expect to use. It gives us some room to increase our energy usage, and after the first summer, we’ll have enough credits to carry us through the winter, meaning that we’ll essentially never pay PG&E for electricity again.

We do have to pay for the system, however. That’s one reason we put this off as long as we did. The system we’re putting in is a $46k system. That’s a major chunk of change. Right now there’s a federal tax rebate that brings it down to $34k, but that’s still a major chunk of change.

This part actually turns out to be pretty painless, however.

There are low-interest, nothing-down, no-prepayment-penalty loans for this sort of thing, and it’s been scaled to a fixed monthly payment that is quite a bit less than our current averaged monthly power bill. So, if all goes well, we will stop paying PG&E (except for a $36/mo connection fee), and will instead pay off a solar loan, and will actually save a little money each year in the process.

The big advantage, however, is to get some independence from PG&E. It’s called a “public utility,” but it is in practice a private investment vehicle, and it has been shorting service, upkeep, and public safety in the name of “dividends” for decades, which is why they have had to resort to PSPS events. There are some things on the horizon that point toward much higher utility rates in the future, with more and longer outages. That’s all prognostication, of course, and it may never come to pass. But there is absolutely no reason to suppose that California electricity will get cheaper during my lifetime.

With solar, we effectively lock in a fixed energy bill that’s lower than our current bill, and since it’s part of the house, it adds to the home value when we (or our heirs) eventually sell it.

This is the story we are starting from. We just gave the GO tonight. Further news as events warrant.

School Prayer

I’d like to start by talking about the Pledge of Allegiance.

The first Pledge of Allegiance in the US was written and publicized in 1885 by Captain George Thatcher Balch, with the intention of teaching patriotism to children in public schools, particularly children of the European immigrants who began to flood the US beginning in 1850. It reads:

We give our heads and hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance

The Pledge of Allegiance was rewritten in 1892 by a socialist minister, Francis Bellamy, as a general pledge to a national flag that could be used by any citizen of any republic.

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance

It was modified in 1923 to make it specific to the United States of America, and again in 1954 (during the post-WWII Cold War against the officially atheistic USSR) to include the words “under God.”

Reciting the Pledge was compulsory in public schools until 1940. The Jehovah’s Witness church, one of the American Fundamentalist sects of Christianity, claimed the Pledge was a form of idolatry in conflict with their religion, challenged the pledge in court, and won. Recitation was officially non-compulsory in public schools from 1940 onward, but in schools where reciting the pledge continued and continues to be practiced, it demonstrably causes discrimination against students who exercise their right to decline, and continues to come up in court cases, one of the most recent being in 2015.

My mother was a fundamentalist (not Jehovah’s Witness, incidentally — I’ve read that there are around 2000 distinct Fundamentalist sects in the US at any given time, and she was raised in one of the many). As a child, she taught me that the Pledge of Allegiance was idolatry, and was quite upset about it.

Every morning in school from the ages of five to eleven, I stood by my desk, faced the flag, put my hand over my heart, and recited a vow of allegiance to a piece of fabric using words like “Republic” and “indivisible,” words utterly meaningless to a six-year old. I had no real idea what it meant.

What I did know was that my mother did not approve, and that — presumably — God did not approve either. So this compulsory act every morning felt like a violation. It did not inspire loyalty to that piece of cloth, nor to the Republic for which it stood. Instead, it inspired distress, anger, and a certain contempt.

I remember the day that I saluted the flag with my hand over my heart with all the fingers curled, except for the middle one. I think it was fifth or sixth grade. I was careful, and was not caught by the teacher, though a couple of other students noticed, and that gained me a day’s notoriety. It was more pre-adolescent rebellion than anything else, and despite the notoriety, it made me feel worse than just going along. So I didn’t do it again. But the ritual was completely meaningless to me after that.

When I entered junior high school, we no longer had a home room, instead moving from classroom to classroom, and any time we might have spent flag-pledging was instead spent winding through the narrow, overcrowded hallways between classes. I don’t recall ever being required to recite the pledge in school after that, certainly not daily.

With that personal experience in mind, I’d like to talk about group prayer in school, particularly in sports.

It suffers from exactly the same defects as the pledge of allegiance.

It’s always easier to just go along, but if you don’t respect the prayer, or the religion, it feels like a violation. That sense of violation breeds distress, anger, and contempt. A constant diet of that in a school setting can be very, very dangerous, for the student (naturally), but also for the other students and teachers.

Students have the “right” to not participate in the group prayer, of course, but the reaction to that refusal in a team setting has very good odds of making you a pariah, meaning you might as well drop the sport and take up chess.

But why pray before a game at all?

Are you actually praying that God will support your team, or smite the other team, so that you can “win?” Seriously?

Are you trying to bind the outcome to God, so that if you lose, you can blame it on divine disfavor instead of poor playing? Or worse, so that if you win, you can claim that you are the favored children of God? Seriously?

Are you asking for God to make sure you don’t get injured on the field? If that’s a concern, why are you playing the sport in the first place? In a war, where the other “team” is literally trying to kill you, and you don’t really have the option of not participating, then yes. But intramural basketball? Seriously?

It’s none of these, of course, but I wanted to get them out of the way.

The coach, in these settings, is attempting to offer a blessing to his team. To do that, he needs to channel divine power — that’s simply the anthropological requirement for human beings: you cannot bless unless you have been blessed. It’s the same thing as a Medieval soldier being shriven by a priest before going into battle. It’s the same as the shaman of a tribe blessing the hunters before a hunt. It is offering a larger-than-life permission to go out and do what needs to be done, without fear, without doubt, without hesitation. It unlocks something primal in the human psyche. A particular edge.

But it loses all its power if you don’t say the words right.

Delivering a blessing is like fitting a key into a lock, and if the key is not the right key for the lock, or if you handle it badly, it not only won’t work, it will sow discord and confusion.

Here’s simple illustration. Take your typical all-white, all-Evangelical-Christian basketball team from a high-school in Indiana, and bring in a Pagan Druid to bless the team just before the Big Game against their toughest competitor. Does ANYONE think this would be a good coaching tactic? I certainly don’t.

Now consider the same team where the star player is Jewish. Or Muslim. Is an Evangelical Christian prayer going to unlock their edge? Unlikely. It’s going to trigger that distress, anger, and contempt, no matter how hard they try to let it slide over them. “This doesn’t include me,” they will think. “I’m not part of the team right now.” Maybe they’ll shake it off, and play well. Maybe they’re so talented that it just doesn’t matter. But you are handicapping them with this prayer. That’s really bad coaching.

You may have just as much trouble if some of your players are devout Catholics.

A great coach will understand all this, viscerally, and he or she will find better ways to bless their team. Just a heartfelt, “I am so proud of you all,” will do far more good for a mixed-faith team than any prayer to a God that some members of the team feel is someone else’s God.

Prayer should simply not be part of public school. In any capacity. Period.

In most cases, public prayer in schools serves no purpose but the narcissism of the self-justified “person of faith” leading the prayer. And regarding these, I shall simply quote Jesus:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

Matthew 6:5 New International Version

The Chattel Slavery of Women

I am furious with the current Supreme Court. It’s been only two days since the Roe v. Wade overturn, and I’m barely coherent. But I am starting to cool, just a bit. Almost down to the melting point of copper.

I’m starting to think that the Court was correct to overturn Roe v. Wade.

This issue has never been about “right to life.” That has always been an empty slogan, a misdirection, a propaganda phrase to manipulate the masses and confuse them.

The real issue is the chattel slavery of women, to serve as breeders.

Let that sink in for a moment.

The original colonies of the United States were founded on chattel slavery. Chattel means “property.” It is property in the same sense that you might consider a cow, or a pair of pants, or a leather wallet your property. Chattel slavery means that the slave is owned by someone. Like a cow, the slave can be bought and sold. If the slave is more trouble than he is worth, he can be “put down” by the master, like a sick cow. The slave could — in principle — even be carved up and eaten, just like a cow.

The slave is property.

Likewise, going back thousands of years, girls were born property of their fathers, and chattel ownership of the girl was transferred to a husband — as in “husbandry,” the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops or livestock — typically in return for a bride-price. A woman without a husband was that most miserable of beings, a slave without a master, a sheep without a shepherd, an old maid or a widow.

Two of the consistent reasons for a man to “put away” his wife throughout history have been infidelity, and a “barren womb.” Infidelity confuses the ownership: which man owns the offspring? Failure to produce offspring means the woman is defective merchandise, and if she cannot be returned for a refund, she should be discarded and replaced.

That is why all of the “medical” arguments for abortion fall on deaf ears among the anti-abortion folks, because these arguments miss the real point. Women in the US are chattel breeders, and if a woman dies in childbirth, the ancient rule is to save the child, not the mother: if the child lives, the woman has fulfilled her sole purpose as a breeder, even if she dies. If the child dies, or is born with defects, it is the woman’s fault as a defective breeder, and she should be discarded and replaced. If she refuses to breed with her husband, by abstinence, contraception, or abortion, she is being willful and disobedient, and can be forced to breed. This is not considered rape. It is only rape if she is impregnated by a man other than her owner.

Among the anti-abortionists, there is absolutely no valid reason for a woman to terminate a pregnancy. The “sanctity of life” argument is a red herring to deflect from the real issue, which is the sanctity of property rights.

Women did not get the right to vote until 1920 in the US. The woman was property. She had one function, which had nothing to do with politics. Would you allow your cow to vote? Your pet dog?

Women were not allowed to speak in the church my mother grew up in, through her adulthood in the 1940’s, and well into my childhood memories in the 60’s. What would be the point? Would you allow your cow or dog to speak in church?

The reason oral contraception was so outrageous when it came out in 1960 was that it gave the power to breed to the woman, taking it away from her husband. Unthinkable!

So the real abortion question is this. Are women chattel? Or are they citizens?

When the US fought the Civil War, it was over the choice of whether to expand or abolish the chattel slavery of workers. It resulted in the Thirteenth Amendment, and then the Fourteenth, which freed the slaves and made them citizens. It is still a matter of great dissent in this benighted nation.

After Roe v. Wade was decided by the Court in 1973, there was an expectation that Congress would follow up with some kind of “Women’s Rights” legislation. That never materialized, and that is where the real problem lies.

As much contempt as I hold for this current Supreme Court — and it is substantial contempt — I don’t think the solution is to expand the court or impeach the justices.

The solution is to fix Congress. By whatever means is necessary.

And then we need to settle this matter of the chattel slavery of women as breeders, by law, and preferably a constitutional amendment.

Will it take another civil war to accomplish this?

Probably.

Roe v. Wade

I’m having a very hard time with the United States right now.

Do I love my country? No. Not today.

Do I love my countrymen? No. Not today.

Absolutely the only caution I have in this sentiment is that I think this is exactly the place that the bastards want us all to be in. I don’t want to give them the satisfaction.

But the alternatives are becoming less supportable with every month that passes.

Today, the US Supreme Court — Supreme is such a sick joke in this context — overturned Roe v. Wade. We all knew it was going to happen. But something fundamental changes when the first shot in an impending war is actually fired. Now that they’ve fired it, I curse them.

I curse them with the one thing their overarching, swollen egos will feel, which is historical condemnation.

I curse you, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett. That your names will be remembered until the English language is lost. That you will be remembered as the bought-and-paid-for corruption at the bitter ending of the American Experiment in democracy. That you will be remembered as collaborators with and bellwethers of the tyranny and anguish that is coming.

I curse you.

I do not wish you death. I wish you a long, long, long life. A life of second thoughts, of doubts, of self-recrimination, and eventually, of public shame. A life of empty bluster and increasingly weak self-justification, ending in misery.

In the end, when you breathe your last and find yourself in the next world, you will search long for your Lord, who will not greet you at the gates as you expected. When you find Him at last, He will be seated on a rock near the Lake of Fire. He will look at you impassively.

Then the children will come. The pre-born, who died in agony, fighting for breath without lungs. The children addicted to toxic drugs at birth. The children born with only fluid where a brain should be, born without arms, or legs, who lived in pain for their entire short existence. The unwanted children born to unfit parents who knew they were unfit, unwanted children beaten, murdered, and destroyed, in body, mind, and soul.

Those who cannot walk will be carried by the mothers who died giving birth, bleeding out, screaming in agony.

Victims of your unspeakable arrogance.

They will roll a huge millstone with them as they approach, inscribed with the names of every mother and child who died untimely because of your “judgement,” a noose fixed through the hole in the center. And you will finally understand the words of Your Lord, that it is better to have a millstone tied around your neck and be cast into the sea, than to have harmed one of these little ones.

They will tighten the noose about your neck, and start it rolling into the Lake of Fire. And your Lord will look at you, at last, with some emotion: with the smoldering ire that drove him to whip the money-changers in the Temple. He will watch without blinking as you are dragged into the flames.

You are cursed.

Keeping Secrets in the Dark

I have to confess, I don’t really understand why the Supreme Court justices are so tweaked about the leak of a draft ruling on Roe v. Wade.

Let’s leave abortion out of this for a moment. Let’s make it about abolishing some obscure turn of law adopted as a precedent in the early 1800’s requiring porcelain garden gnomes to be placed front of government buildings. (I just made that up, by the way.)

Someone — someone — then leaks a draft of the Supreme Court opinion that abolishes the Garden Gnome Precedent.

RAGE! The Sanctity of the Court has been compromised! No one in the Court can be trusted! Who leaked this document? Search out the vile miscreant! SOMEONE NEEDS TO PAY! We can only hope and pray that The People will not lose ALL TRUST in the Court because of this! ARRRGGGHHHHH!

Seriously?

When people start to distrust the courts, it is (and has always been, and will always be, in all times and all places, forever and ever) the result of the Court repeatedly handing down shit decisions.

The real issue here appears to be that the Court was “outed” over a shit decision in-the-making before they had the chance to pass it off as settled law. In this regard, it is a bit like the failed coup of January 6, 2020. When you attempt to overthrow the government, the goal is to get it over with before anyone catches on. Otherwise, it turns into “for want of a nail,” and all that.

When you intend to hand down a shit decision from the Supreme Court, it’s useful to keep it secret until it’s a done deal.

All this outrage from Alito and Thomas in itself seems to me a plausible reason to distrust the Court. Something is distinctly off. Like opening the door to your son’s room to tell him dinner is ready, and when a cloud smelling of skunk and mint wafts out, he launches into a screaming rage about “privacy.”

It isn’t about privacy.

In other words, I think all this rage and pouting is really about the fact that the very justices who wrote the draft already know it’s a shit ruling. It would not matter if it were about abortion, or porcelain garden gnomes. The court understands perfectly well that it is trying to wrap the law around something indefensible, and now that it’s out in the open, they are going to have to face the wrath and distrust of The People before they’ve managed to make it a done deal.

So let’s talk a little about the history of both the nation and the Court.

There have been two fundamentally different models of (white) government in the US since the Europeans arrived.

The first — the earliest — consisted of entirely autonomous colonies (subject to European rule, but like mobsters, if you keep them paid, they leave you alone), which gradually expanded, consolidated, and became the original thirteen states of the US. The Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1777, bound these thirteen states together as a Confederation. In 1789, the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the US Constitution.

The core problem with the original Confederation, and with the United States up until the mid 1850’s, was that the states really didn’t get along very well.

One of the difficulties was slavery.

The southern states, in particular, had grown rich on an agrarian model, exporting various crops and agricultural products to Europe, and the profit margins were based on the economics of slave labor. Between the original colonies in the early 1600’s and the states of the early 1800’s, several things changed. The southern agrarian model depleted the soil, especially cultivating cotton, so yields declined. Competition from other nations started to cut into export profits. The slave trade started to decline, particularly after England abolished slavery (1807), raising the prices and reducing availability of slaves. And perhaps most importantly, the Mechanical Age, or the Technological Age, was rapidly replacing manual labor, and capturing the lion’s share of new wealth. This gave the northern states an alternative to trying to compete with export of agrarian products, an alternative that required an increasing number of increasingly skilled workers.

Slaves escaping to northern states could be trained.

Slavery turned into a very tense national issue through the early 1800’s, particularly as the Abolitionists began making a strong (i.e convincing) moral/ethical argument against the institution of human slavery.

In 1861, the southern states seceded from the northern Union of States, and formed a new Confederacy of States under new Articles of Confederation. The Union and the Confederacy went to war.

The Confederacy lost the war, was abolished, and its states were re-absorbed into the Union. All the states again became a United States of America under the Constitution.

This tension between a single united government, and a loose confederation of sovereign states, has never receded more than momentarily since 1778. It still lives.

One of the central issues is the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery immediately after the Civil War, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which made full citizens of black people and gave them the right to vote. It is intrusive on “freedoms” in two very fundamental ways.

First, it abolishes slavery across all of the states, which establishes that the federal government can, indeed, tell the states what they can and cannot do.

Second, it establishes that the federal government can establish national laws based on a moral basis — we call it “humanitarian,” but that’s just a sugar-frosted word for “moral.” From an economic standpoint, slavery is and has always been economically profitable for the slaveowners (though it generally sucks for the slaves.) You need look no further than the $15/hour sticking-point on the national minimum wage to see that slavery is still profitable. But outright slavery — legal ownership of human beings as property — is enshrined in the Fourteenth amendment as “morally repugnant” (and illegal) within the United States.

Moving to the present, there is a current strain of legal theory called “originalism.” I’m not the right person to walk the ins and outs of this theory, but my take on it is that it basically wants to go back to a Confederacy model of sovereign “states’ rights,” much as was embodied in the original US Articles of Confederation and the original Constitution, minus all of the fluffy Amendments (including the Bill of Rights). It isn’t clear if they think the entire Bill of Rights needs to go, but the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments definitely need to go, and pretty much everything after that. It’s all lumped together as “federal overreach.”

This legal theory is deeply dependent upon understanding the “Original Intent of the Framers.” Of course, the only people who could possibly determine this “Original Intent” are legal scholars like (for instance) Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Perhaps John Eastman, the “legal scholar” involved in the Jan 6 coup. Perhaps Jared Kushner: he’s apparently an expert on everything.

The naked conceit that any 21st century person could truly understand the “intent” of an 18th century slaveowner-turned-statesman is ridiculous.

My observation is that people who pretend to understand the Intent of the Framers are running a con. Or to step away from American slang usage, they are simply lying.

But fine. Let’s just presume that they have some kind of magical, trans-historical psychic power that lets them enter into the mind of, say, Alexander Hamilton, and divine his Inner Thoughts.

So what?

We live in a different world than Alexander Hamilton could possibly have imagined. These historical people were not gods. They were not all-knowing. Many of them weren’t all that smart. All of them were flawed.

I personally believe that “originalism,” as a legal theory, is an intellectual fraud, at such a basic level that even a layman like myself can call bullshit with some confidence. It’s merely a way to overturn custom and government while pretending to “restore” it to a romanticized earlier state that almost certainly never existed.

But the two fundamentally different philosophies of government remain, and those are quite real.

So to bring this back to the Rage in the Supreme Court, I think this current packed Court’s intent — at root, with all dissembling stripped away — is to abolish the Fourteenth Amendment, to “restore freedom.”

When you hear people screaming about “freedom,” the Fourteenth Amendment is at the core of it. And they are basically screaming for their state governments to have the freedom to oppress citizens of that state in cruel and arbitrary ways, as in the Good Old Days. The right of states to do whatever they damn well please. To bring back slavery. To criminalize abortion. To make Christian Evangelicalism the State Religion. To restrict the vote to “desirable, productive” citizens. To deport minorities. To lynch people on hearsay without trial or evidence. To maintain Law and Order with armed militias.

The people screaming about “freedom” think this freedom applies to them as individuals, because they are all the “right kind of people.”

They are in for such a rude awakening….

The Fourth Turning

The Fourth Turning is a book by William Strauss and Neil Howe, published in December of 1997.

The thing that first caught my eye was that they predicted an odd and rather catastrophic problem in US politics that would be unfolding between 2005 and 2025. It wasn’t entirely specific, but it was detailed enough to make me sit up and wonder, “How in the world did they know about THAT?”

Recall that, in 1997, Bill Clinton was president, Windows 95 was new, Islamic terrorists were firmly “over there,” the Twin Towers still stood tall in New York City, and you could wear your shoes all the way through the airports. The biggest, baddest thing on the horizon was the “Y2K Bug,” though it was comfortably three years away. Only scientists and science fiction authors talked about Hubbard’s Peak, and “Global Warming” was a private crusade of Al Gore.

Yet here the authors of this book were talking about Generation X (children born in the 1980’s, barely teens) being derided in the 2000’s as worthless in all possible ways, widespread distrust and disgust with all branches of national government including the Supreme Court, economic turmoil on a major scale, and the rise of fascism in the US, all brought about by a “trigger event” sometime in the mid-2000’s decade.

Think back, folks. Think hard. All of these things were purest dystopian science fiction in 1997.

Yet here we are.

How did they know about THAT?

There’s a remarkable simplicity to their observations: there’s a pattern in history. It’s as predictable as coming darkness, after the sun gets low in the West and the clouds start to turn orange.

I need to write about this, because writing is my way of thinking out loud and settling my thoughts. There is a lot to think about here.

Let’s start where the authors do, with the concept of the Saeculum. This is a Latin term, and it comes from a Roman concept, borrowed from the Greeks, and probably goes back as far in history as you wish to go. It is generally defined as a period of between 80 and 100 years, based on the measure of a long human lifespan. Most of us make it to our 70’s (if we survive childhood illness and wars and plagues), and always have. Many surpass 80. Some surpass 90. Few cross the 100-year line. Saeculum is the name for a historical period roughly equivalent to a “long human life.”

Another observation is the concept of a Generation. We’re all aware of the meaning of this, and most of us relate to a particular generation. A “generation” is not strictly bounded by dates or age. We could call it a kind of collective mindset. We talk about the “Boomer” generation, for instance, and nearly everyone alive either identifies with this generation, or does not, and usually quite strongly.

What’s interesting is that there is any identifiable thing called a generation. We are all born on different dates, and born to different parents over a wide range of ethnicities, wealth, geography, and recent history. First grade classes are always full, as are high school graduations, and new graduates enter the world as young adults every year. You would think we would be all quite different from each other, spread out along a continuum. Yet we somehow fall into these very distinct generational categories, and go through our life-changes as a cohort, or a “generation.”

Another observation is that generations have types that occur in a cycle over the course of the Saeculum. This is largely invisible to us as individuals, for the simple reason that there are roughly four distinct generations in a Saeculum, that is, a long human life. The generation most like our own was therefore our great-great-grandparents, and we will not see another generation like ours until our great-great-grandchildren. No one nearer in time is really anything like us, and because this spans the entire Saeculum, the long human life, most of us will never meet anyone like ourselves from a different generation. Our great-great-grandparents were gone before we were old enough to remember them, and we will be gone before our great-great-grandchildren will know us. So all that most of us ever see, throughout our lives, are the three generations before us, and the three after us, and they are all very different from us.

We all think — with good reason — that we are alone, and quite unique.

What I’m starting to notice, now that I’m a grandfather, is that there really are similarities between my own grandchildren, and my grandparents. Or in my case, my parents, since my parents were around 40 when they married.

Something about this concept of generations pulls all of us together into this generational collective mindset.

So let’s talk about this cycle of generations, using the latest cycle for reference. The authors give the generations “functional” (recurrent) names, as well as specific names that have been used to describe these particular generations in history:

  • Hero : G.I. generation
  • Artist : Silent generation
  • Prophet : Boomer generation
  • Nomad : X generation

The next generation to come is the Millennials, and they are currently in their school years. They will (or should) become the next Hero generation. The one that follows them is not yet named, because they haven’t been born, but they will be an Artist generation. The one to follow that will be a Prophet generation. And so the cycle continues.

The ordering of this is pretty much fixed, not just by the nature of the parental generation, but by the combination of the parent, grandparent, and great-grandparent generations, all functioning at different levels of society. When a generation is born, the great-grandparents hold the greatest influence within society, as the elders in government, religion, business, and communities. The grandparents hold the senior-management power: the supervisors, the deacons, the school principals, the senior bureaucracy. The parents form the young working class. This combination, and the tensions between these generations, are what shape the newborn generation.

As the new generation comes of age and starts having its own children, their great-grandparents are either dying or stepping-down, their grandparents are moving into fullest power, their parents are moving into senior management, and they themselves are becoming the young working class.

There are two major cyclic events within each Saeculum, one called The Awakening, and the other called The Crisis. The resolution of the Crisis is coincident with the coming-of-age of a Hero generation, while the Awakening is coincident with the coming-of-age of a Prophet generation. This is a straightforward pendulum between material and spiritual peaks. The Hero builds a functional society that glosses over spiritual values and justice in the name of expediency, and the Prophet addresses a spiritual awakening and re-assessment that glosses over functionality.

A Hero generation is an enthusiast of the society it has built. A Prophet generation is a critic of the society it lives in.

At cross-quarters to this cycle is the cycle of the Artists and Nomads. The Artists come of age in the midst of a materially functional society marked by stability, material opportunity, and cultural enthusiasm, but also by conformity, conventionality, and a certain kind of stagnation. The Nomads come of age in the midst of an increasingly dysfunctional society full of almost unlimited freedom (or license), but marked by increasing instability, declining safety and access to opportunity, and the need to improvise, partition, and disconnect just to survive.

An Artist generation is full of bright hope for the future of society, even if it is a tad dull. A Nomad generation sees little or no hope for the future of society, though it can be profitable and exciting if you are willing to be nimble and not-too-fussy about the rules.

So let’s talk a little about where we are in 2022. It sure ain’t 1997.

We are sixteen months out from an attempted coup by a sitting President to retain his office despite a resounding rejection at the polls.

We have a Supreme Court worried that a premature leak of a draft decision regarding Roe v. Wade is going to “damage confidence in the Supreme Court,” apparently in some strange universe where loss of decorum — rather than shit rulings — is what makes people lose confidence in the Court.

We have a Congress that simply cannot govern, and at least one party (Republicans) clearly not even interested in governing.

We have increasingly open Christo-Fascist movements agitating for dissolving the United States, by force and terror, with substantial support among Republican politicians at every level.

We have an economy constantly on the edge, just one misstep from inflationary collapse, supply-chain collapse, production collapse. The rot is deep.

We have a billionaire class rapidly advancing to a trillionaire class in an inflationary economy where much of the nation lives on less than $15/hour.

We have WW3 on the horizon, should an aging, ill, and demented Russian dictator decide, Oh, what the Hell….

We have global warming on a runaway course of destruction, and we are rushing into its arms like a lover.

The Prophet generation — the Boomer generation — is aging, and the Silent generation is dying out. The Nomad generation is well into parenting years, and the next Hero generation is is school.

We are moving toward a Crisis writ as large as WWII. Times that “try men’s souls.”

Here’s the comfort: this has all happened before. This has been the Saecular cycle for as far back as we care to look, with remarkable (though not infallible) regularity. The reason we don’t recognize it, as we recognized the cycle of day and night, or the cycle of the seasons, is that the cycle lives just outside living memory.

On the plus side of this comfort is that in the past, the US has always pulled through Crises into a new Saeculum that was better than what came before.

On the minus side of this comfort is that there is no guarantee that this Saeculum (or any other) will end well. Nations fall. Civilizations vanish.

—

I’d like to close with a figure he authors call the Gray Champion, dating from 1689.

King James II was about to strip the US colonists of their liberties and their fantasies of self-rule, and the Colonial Governor marched troops through Boston in a show of strength. As they marched, “the figure of an ancient man” with “the eye, the face, the attitude of command” appeared on the street and stood in the path of the soldiers, and demanded that they stop. His appearance was so daunting that they did. This so inspired the citizens of Boston that they deposed and jailed the governor, which set in motion forces that eventually led to the Revolution a century later. No one knew exactly who this “Gray Champion” was, save that he was once one of the young Puritans who had settled in New England a half-century before.

The Gray Champion has re-emerged in each of the major American Crises since.

A Prophet.

A Boomer of a bygone age.

As the generation that has been charged with safeguarding the Spirit of the Nation, of looking deep into the spirit of the nation and of criticizing its hypocrisy, and injustice, and failings, it falls to us in our nation’s time of need to stand, and say, “This shall not pass.” To be the Gray Champion of our time.

And in so doing, to precipitate the Crisis, and guide the nation through it.

Just as it will fall to the Nomads to get us through the chaos by finding ways to keep the material side together.

Just as it will fall to the Heroes to build something — as a generation — that will rebuild from the wreckage, and inspire hope and enthusiasm for the future.

Just as it will fall to the next Artists to enjoy the harvest of fair times, to perfect and embellish.

Just as it will fall to the next Prophets to focus on what was left behind and corrupted in the chaos and compromise and rebuilding. To call out the injustice, and the spiritual emptiness, and the hypocrisy.

This is not a time to be cowed by statistics. This is a time to stand up for what is right.

To become the Gray Champion.

The Bells

The Witches’ Bells started to toll as the Senator entered the parking garage under the US Capitol. The Bells were loud today. They had been tuned to the Capitol building.

“It’s the speed of sound,” one of her staff had explained, back when the Witches had first started ringing the Bells. It reminded her of her father teaching her as a child to count off the seconds between a lightning flash and the thunder. He’d explained that it takes sound about five seconds to travel a mile, but light travels almost instantly. So if the lightning was a mile away, you would see the flash the moment the lightning struck, but the sound wouldn’t arrive until a full five seconds later.

There were thirteen Bells located around the Capitol area, and a master computer program timed them all. One stroke every five seconds, but rung at slightly different instants so that the sound would arrive at a location of choice at exactly the same moment. People called it “tuning” the Bells.

When you were at the tuning-point, it was an uncanny, disturbing sound. It seemed to come from everywhere, and nowhere, almost like you were inside the bell. It also seemed impossible to block out the sound. The thick walls and bulletproof glass of the Capitol building only muted it. If you used earplugs, you could still feel it in your chest and belly. The relentless five-second peal got into your head, into your heartbeat, and rubbed you raw from the inside out.

But it wasn’t merely an annoyance. The Bells carried a moral burden. A curse, in fact. An actual curse.

She remembered the first news item she’d seen, five years ago: an unsteady iPhone video from a bystander watching a street-performance, accompanied by the usual snarky commentary from celebrity newscasters. The video showed a portion of the Supreme Court building in the background, and three women, pushing a long cylindrical wind chime that hung from a wheeled framework. All were dressed in full-body leotards, with hooded cloaks: one wore white, one wore black, and one wore scarlet. Their faces were painted in the same colors as their clothing, with stylized features: the woman in white had a cold, pitiless face, like a porcelain mask; the woman in black wore an expression of permanent anguish; the woman in red had the appearance of a vengeful demon from Hell. The women gathered around the wind chime and stood motionless, facing inward. A small crowd gathered.

Then the woman in white pulled a large book from a pocket inside her cloak, and a large feathered quill. She opened the book, and wrote in it with the quill. She raised her face, and called out in a loud voice.

Allison Sue Baker!

The woman in black drew a black stick from her inner cloak pocket, tipped with a dull black rubber ball, and struck the chime. It was surprisingly loud and faded slowly, as the woman in black crouched and threw back her head, hands raised in supplication to Heaven, teeth bared in a grimace of pain.

The woman in red whirled, her cloak spreading out like wings, and she lifted her hands toward the Supreme Court Building, fingers twisted into claws. She called out in a loud voice.

I DO CURSE THEE, JOHN GLOVER ROBERTS.

Then all three women screamed.

The women had powerful voices, trained voices, opera voices, and the long shriek they produced caused the entire crowd to surge backward. It seemed to go on forever, then cut off instantly. All three turned back to face the chime.

Nine times they repeated this ritual, each time calling out a different woman’s name, and cursing another of the nine Supreme Court Justices. Then they wheeled the garden chime away, separated, and vanished into the Washington crowds.

The Senator pulled into her assigned parking spot. She knew the tolling of the Bells would continue for at least another hour, perhaps two. That was the real genius — the cruel genius — of the Bells. Each toll represented one young woman’s life lost to a botched self-administered abortion.

Statistics were just numbers. Six hundred thousand abortions per year, before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Divide by 365, and you have 1600 abortions per day. Roughly half of those were now classified as homicides in states around the country, so that’s 800 per day done with a coat hanger or knitting needle, or using deadly poisons. If only half of those resulted in a fatality, that was four hundred deaths a day. Four hundred out of a population of 300 million. Negligible.

But four hundred deaths, measured by slow bell, is 33 minutes.

Every. Single. Day.

And that isn’t counting the suicides.

The Senator gritted her teeth. She threw open her car door violently, dinging the car next to hers, and found she didn’t care. She closed her door partway, and then slammed it into the other car as hard as she could. It made a satisfying scraping sound.

She got out, slammed her car door shut, and strode toward the elevator. The tolling of the Bells echoed in the concrete cave of the parking garage. A curse, a scream, a death, every five seconds.

The Witches’ Bells were all owned by the Church of the Three Sisters, a new church that had registered as a tax-exempt religious organization shortly after the Three Witches had staged their street theater a stone’s throw from the Supreme Court building.

The Church had immediately begun to preach in favor of a national law codifying a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, medical care, and privacy. There was serious money behind the movement — they had been able to purchase the thirteen properties in DC where the Witches’ Bells were located, as well as create a national network of churches throughout the country. Those churches offered places for parents who had lost daughters to come together and grieve and speak freely. That had created a powerful political coalition that had put a lot of pressure on her party to pass today’s Women’s Rights bill.

The Senator was still a freshman Senator, only two years into her first term, but she’d been hand-picked by the Majority Leader to play hard-to-get on today’s vote. It had been a key role in ensuring that today’s vote would fail. She’d felt honored, and flattered.

Her role was to pretend to be on the fence, to act as a honey-pot to attract the attention of the other side. Several of her party had already defected, and if she joined them, the other side would be able to pass the bill directly. That was the honey: the other side knew they only needed one more vote, and she courted their attention. There were other members of her party far more likely to defect under pressure, but she’d managed to draw attention away from them by playing the second-year ingénue. Her vote with her party line today would not only scuttle the bill, it would bring substantial rewards for her.

A sudden instant of overwhelming panic and doubt almost made her stumble.

Am I ready for this?

She took a deep breath, and then continued toward the Senate chambers.

The Majority leader glanced up as she entered, and he immediately moved toward her.

“I’m surprised to see you here,” he said quietly.

“It’s an important vote,” she said.

“It is,” he said. “But you’ve already done your part, and done it well. We could have managed without you today. You should be home.”

“I need to see this through,” she said, her jaw tight.

He gave her a strange look. She broke eye contact and headed toward her seat.

She paid little attention to proceedings until the Majority Leader raised the Women’s Rights bill, S.12. She stood.

“Majority Leader, I wish to address the Senate,” she said, her voice firm.

He looked up, sudden alarm in his face. This was not any part of the script they’d discussed. She waited.

After a long moment, he said, “The Chair recognizes the Senator from Texas.”

She looked around the room.

“Some of you know that my husband and I have very recently suffered a terrible loss. The rest of you should know, as well. We lost our daughter over this past weekend. She is dead. What most of you would never learn is that she died by her own hand. She was a suicide.”

There was a stir of movement around the chamber, but now she had their full attention.

“She was also pregnant.”

The room became deathly quiet. Every eye was on her.

“My husband and I are devout Christians, as you all know, and we are deeply involved with our church in Texas. We have always believed that ending a pregnancy is a sin against God, and we celebrated the overturn of Roe v. Wade five years ago. I entered politics to ensure that abortion would never again be legalized, because we believe that there is always another way, a way that does not end an innocent life. We supported our daughter. We knew her boyfriend, and we felt he was a good young man. We were disappointed that they weren’t willing to wait, but we were more than willing to bless their marriage. 

“She refused. My daughter refused. She said she would not marry her boyfriend, and she would not give birth to the child. She demanded that we take her out-of-state to abort the child.

“We didn’t understand. We tried to reason with her. We told her that we would be there for her, that we could make it work. We counseled with our pastor.

“She finally told us that her boyfriend was not the father of the child. But she would not tell us who had fathered the child. We … we still didn’t understand.”

Her breath caught. She looked down. A tear ran down her face. She straightened her shoulders and took a deep breath.

“My daughter left a note. She explained in writing everything she could not say to us.

“She wrote that her boyfriend was not the father of her child. It was her boyfriend’s father who had sired the child. It was rape. A forcible rape by a man my husband’s age.

“Had our daughter bent to our wishes, she would have quietly, obediently married her boyfriend, and would have lived the rest of her life in the terror of another rape by her father-in-law. Of another child that was not her husband’s.”

The Senator took a deep, slow breath.

“HOW IS THIS JUSTICE?” she screamed.

A babble of shouts and arguments erupted.

“I. STILL. HOLD. THE. FLOOR.” the Senator shouted, each word like a gunshot.

The babble subsided. The Senator waited for complete silence.

“I set my sights on preventing the death of an innocent life,” she said, quietly. “I destroyed two innocent lives. Not one. Two.”

She paused for a moment.

“You do not set a bone before you straighten it. You do not give birth to a child — a precious child — before you at least try to straighten the life that will raise it.

“And there are times when you must amputate a limb to save a life.

“The criminalization of abortion is wrong. It is vicious, it is arrogant, and it is wrong.

“I will vote in favor of S.12. I urge all of you to vote for it as well.

“I yield the floor.”

She sank into her seat as an uproar rose around her. She ignored it. She lost track of time.

When she returned to the room, she found the chamber empty, except for the Majority Leader, who stood in front of her.

“What will you do?” he asked.

“What will I do?”

“Your career here is over. You’ve done some damage. No, I’ll be honest. You’ve done quite a lot of damage. But it won’t really change anything.”

“Oh, that,” she replied. “Yes, once the vote is taken, I’ll step down. Health reasons, probably. I haven’t really decided. I won’t look back. You needn’t worry.”

“So what will you do?”

She thought for a long moment.

“I think I might join the Witches,” she said.

She stood and left the Senate chambers.

She did not look back.