The Handmaid’s Tale Is Upon Us

Thanks to the workings of the most corrupt president in American History and a power hungry GOP lead by the “turtle” in the U S Senate, Mitch McConnell, the United States Supreme Court has been turned into a killer of personal rights. Between them, McConnell and Trump managed to place three anti-democratic justices on the highest court in the land.

And now that polluted body (ruling 6 to 3) has finally saw fit to overturn the most sacred right of American women: the right to control their own bodies. The court decreed that individual states alone — not the women themselves, their doctors and their spiritual advisers — have the right to decide a women’s birthing outcome.

Yes, my friends, the Handmaid’s Tale that was written in 1985 as a warning of what can happen to a nation’s freedoms when a perverted rightwing religion unites with corrupt political power to override the will of the nation’s majority to a dystopian end.

A majority of the court said that the Federal Constitution did not explicitly mention a women’s right to control her own body — no kidding. There are literally thousands of concepts not explicitly mention in the Constitution. It’s an extremely generalized document primarily meant to promote property rights, personal rights and the rule of law over the rule of men.

Of course because of Southern slavery and the practcal concession granted to the peculiar institution, the ideals behind that sacred document suffered a rough start that was only partly remedied by a bloodily civil war, or, as the guilty party likes to say “the war between the states.”

Indeed, moral and technological similarities of our American society today are nothing like that which existed when the Constitution was originally authored in the eighteenth century. Frozen minded ideologues, however, insist on proceeding on the basis that the Constitution is a dead work incapable of change. No way! The purpose of the Constitution and the founding Fathers experiment in democracy was to try and overcome the age old system of governing power — might makes right.

The founders of the United States were highly cognizant of the fact that trying to overcome nature’s crude system of governance by physical coercion would be a difficult undertaking, which it most certainly has been. This accounts for Benjamin Franklin’s ominous warning in answer to the question of what kind of government do we have?: “a democracy if you can keep it.”

The flaw in American democracy lies not so much with its generalized Constitution as it does with the structure of government itself. The ruling class, not being totally honest about its desire for a democracy, structured a system of voting and representation that allowed for a minority to overrule the majority’s will. For some fifty years the Republican Party has been hard at work gaming the system for a super minority control system.

And, thus, here we are, a minority driving us toward a totalitarian state, with women’s right’s becoming one of the first major casualties. The next two election cycles will be the last chance for thinking, caring and rational Americans to keep the rest of our freedoms that many have likely taken for granted.

The proposition is simple. One party, the Republican Party, is out to destroy democracy via any means possible — including violence (can you say January 6th)— for gaining and maintaining power at the cost of the majority. The Democrat Party is desperately trying to save Democracy in a sometimes fumbling way, but they are the only chance we have to preserve and retrieve our lost freedoms of choice.

Freedom isn’t free and if you don’t act to save our democracy by voting against every MAGA Republican in sight you will surely lose it and the Handmaids will be everywhere among us.