Not over. As someone alive before Chevron precedent, before legal abortion, before many things being flipped back in time existed, I can say you can fight this war&win it. Again. &this time, people have sunk costs&reaped benefits where before it was theoretical. They will feel&resent the loss.
Yep! When I was born, there were rivers on fire in the US, women couldn't even open their own bank accounts, let alone have access to abortion, it was illegal to be gay in most states, etc. It is horrifying to see progress erased, but that does not mean we can't fight back and reclaim it.
A friend (same age as me) who grew up in LA told me they used to have "smog days" instead of "snow days." The air was too awful to go outside, so school would be canceled. You couldn't see the nearby mountains because of the smog. The work to clean it up was rough, but it was successful.
I love to teach about the reaction mechanism of ozone depletion in my chem classes. I always tell the students, "I know it doesn't feel like this in your world today, but humans DO have the capacity to solve crises, and in fact we have done so many times throughout history."
That was my childhood in the San Gabriel Valley, in Richard Nixon's hometown. We'd usually have school for a few hours in the morning and then be sent home early in the afternoon.
My mother used to tell me stories about how bad the San Francisco Bay smelled when she was a girl.
Things got better.
I remember my mother being so excited to order checks that had both my dad’s name and her name on them. They had been married since 1951, and she signed “Mrs. Herbert N. Smith” on every check from 1951 until the mid 1970s.
Yup. My youngest brother was born in the early 1960s. There were problems and my mother had to get a hysterectomy. She had borne 5 children. I was old enough to remember the hell that the parish priest gave my mother. Another reason why I left the church asap.
The scary thing is that progress involved building & using new legal and political tools, and this court attacks the legal foundations of those tools.
Their decisions are cruel, factually dishonest and procedurally nonsensical, but what mechanism exists to tear them up without more decades fighting?
Right. We assume the passage of time means progress. But change comes from people's interactions (including disengagement). The idea that a few marches or a politician who seems like a messiah will magically make permanent change is untethered from reality. It's lazy, not independent, thinking.
