Dead Letter Department #33

(did you miss Dead Letter Department #32? read about cabins in the woods & the mists of time here.)

weather report

I don’t know about you, but the Supreme Court ruling on Roe v Wade took me out completely. It’s not that I wasn’t expecting it—I’ve been paying enough attention to know this was coming, & talk to enough better informed people to understand that we are essentially living in a theocracy now—but it still took me out, not at the knees but directly in the gut. I got the news in a “Fuck this” text message while I was taking my mom grocery shopping, & spent the usual amount of time rage-scrolling (the amount of venom I feel for Clarence Thomas is inexpressible in this letter) & thinking out the increasingly, compoundingly hideous scenarios once they start coming for contraception & queer rights, which, if you missed it, is on the horizon.

Then I went to the protest downtown. It was hard. I didn’t want to go, I was already so sad & tired, but I knew I didn’t want to look back at the day the ruling came down & feel like I could have gone & I didn’t. I wanted to have some sort of action to look back on, even a tiny one. I have been to so many protests at our City Hall that I have a usual route for them, so my friend picked me up & we went to stand with a few hundred other sad, furious people. A lot of of the signs were funny—we are unquestionably funnier than our opposition—but the one I remember was being held by the little four year old girl next to us in the crowd, which didn’t have any words or even discernible images on it, just bright smears of color. She’d clearly painted it herself, with what looked like fingerpaints, & it was pasted to a couple of popsicle sticks. I just kept imagining her parents trying to explain to her that the whole family was going to go to a protest & did she want to make a sign, & then she sat down & did a little art project at the kitchen table so she could hoist it above her head & carry it in the march the way the grown ups were. She will barely remember the time before this happened—it’s already history to her.

We listened to someone from Planned Parenthood, & a trans man talking about his abortion, & a teenager from the high school who blew my tiny mind with how carefully she’d already been thinking about everything. The cheers for her were about a full octave up from the ones for everyone else, practically a scream, so clearly a lot of her friends had come to hear her speak.

It was good to not be taking the full force of the blow alone, for that first night. Protests serve a lot of functions, but one of them is reminding you that it’s not just you & the news & your fury—there are a ton of other people out there on your side, & lots of them have already been working hard on this, & some of them are brand new, but they all cared enough to think about people getting plowed over by counter protestors & then showed up anyway. Maybe I’m just a coward, but I do think about that every time I go.

A lot of the older women were crying. They’d seen this era before, they lived through it last time. They know, viscerally, what it’s like to not have access to this basic human right. There were a ton of queer folks, of course, in families & little groups, & one solo very young trans guy with his brave little pink & blue banner flying away on his backpack who I wanted to scoop up & adopt on the spot. A man with a bright red crocheted beret & a lizard on his shoulder was collecting signatures to get universal healthcare on the ballot in Washington, which I thought was very enterprising under the circumstances—a true organizer, that one, to get up in the face of the grief & take the opportunity of us all being together.

A friend asked where the best place to give right now is so I asked my abortion provider bestie & she says it’s abortion funds & travel for all the people who just lost access.  This article is a good place to start, & New York Magazine's coverage on abortion access in general has been excellent.

If you’re looking for someone to rage with, the Dead Letter Department is up to the neck in it, full of sorrow & anger, & would be happy to hear from you at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. If you’re nervous about going to the protest next time, come find me in the crowd, we can stand together.

I didn’t take any pictures for you, because even in my little blue city I know that’s increasingly a bad idea (thank you experienced activists for explaining why), so here’s a picture of the sandwich I ate afterwards at the cafe in the museum courtyard. It’s called a tigelle.

When you look at it, imagine all the tired, keyed up people streaming down the sidewalk past the table, holding onto each other, still clutching their signs.

No one good thing this time—I don’t have it in me, but I promise the next letter will be a return to form. I’m not giving up yet.