When Old Women Get Militant

I once started a poem that got stalled on, " I have a life...I don't know where it's going yet."

I wrote that 40 years ago, and I still don't know. It still seems interesting.

Oh, I can set goals and even achieve them. I've made minor marks on the world. I'm glad for them.
But how do I deal with .....THIS?

Trump isn't Hitler.

But what is going to happen to the world, to my country? What already has happened?  We are divided in a way not seen in more than a century. And we face real world challenges we have not had before.

It makes me itch when people talk about "the world" and don't include anything but our own specie. There is so much more world out there.

Fifty years ago you could have an abortion in a much more judgmental society and you wouldn't automatically be assigned to Hell, if it exists.  In the 60s, when unwed pregnancies were anathema, I volunteered in a major public hospital 8 hours a week in the emergency room. I was 22. Innocent as dirt. My day was 3-11 on Mondays.  Mondays are quiet in emergency, generally.  I still remember those girls, those women, coming into emergency with septic infections from coathanger abortions, screaming for their mamas. They were all colors. Truth to tell, mostly white.

I live in a state where abortions are legal, but pious Republicans have made it so difficult, many can't either get to a clinic or afford it. I mean--if you have to go 300-600 miles to the clinic, what do you do?  Today, there's not the shame. But if your man leaves you pregnant, you already have two pre-schoolers and now you need to step up? and there's NO free daycare, forget about that. Texas is being looked at because since the legislature banned Planned Parenthood, essentially, since 2011, our death rates for women one year postpartum has skyrocketed. No problem here, says  our legislature. Only good health care here.

Sorry. I'm free-choice, including abortion. And I don't think it's Biblical. And I'm a church lady. And I prepare communion for my church every Sunday. 

And I believe in a healthy land for my grandchildren and their grandchildren.

And here's what I am doing currently. I am not listening to what ifs. I am evaluating the done sos. That isn't particularly comforting, but life can change.

I am, right now, saying what I believe, and I will follow it.

I'm not going to waste time arguing. I don't have the energy.

But if I can help, if I can do, if I can try to make a difference, I will.  I don't know how my great-great grandchildren will fare. But they at least deserve my trying to make it better for them.