Fright, Flight, or Fight
Women: feel your feelings. Then, stop numbing them and take action
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I refreshed the page again, and again, willing a more desirable option to magically appear.
Singapore tops many “best places to live” lists. With sustainability high on their to-do list, an incredible food scene, and a higher quality of living than most places on Earth, the city-state seemed appealing at first glance but what would their cane-wielding leaders do when my kids accidentally kicked a soccer ball through someone’s dual-paned window?
Scandinavia was out too — it was too white, the people were too gorgeous, and even with global warming it would remain way too cold during my lifetime. While the Hobbit life appealed, New Zealand’s gorgeous landscape and on-point political policies were still floating atop a quickly rising sea.
I refreshed again, desperate to go somewhere. Anywhere. I needed an out. I’d felt this way before. After my parents first fell from their pedestals when I was a teenager. After 9/11. After invading Iraq. After Trump. But I always fell back on trusting the checks and balances of the U.S., believing in others like me fighting to move the dial from oppression toward equity. At least that’s how I justified staying in California. The simple comforts of peaches at the farmers market and thirteen types of almond butter to choose from, stable jobs, and my family nearby made leaving always feel too daunting.
But now, the very thing so many women had been hollering about since Trump entered office had finally happened. Roe v Wade was abolished. Fifty years of women having a choice (and the privacy of that decision) over what we do with our bodies was made much harder last week for too many women. With just the signatures of four men and one infuriating female who Americans did not have any say about, the autonomy of what an entire gender chooses to do with our bodies was stolen.
Friends argue that this is just another ploy by white men to keep white women (the majority of women who have abortions) having babies — you can’t be the majority without white ladies popping our more white babies. Others say this is a way to steal more power — take that Kamala Harris and all you nasty women: when you rise up, we cut you down. We…
