08 May 2022 | The Great Hanger Reboot

While the Supreme Court ruling in June will directly effect half of the population right out of the gate, I suspect that half of *them* probably won’t care too much.

What is stupid, vulgar and evil has already been normalized in American life. My gut feeling is that scores of women will just go ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and think “it’s really not that bad.” (And I believe many of them will be younger women.) While it’s understandable that lots of folks who support choice think some mass uprising is going to happen, the more likely outcome is the aforementioned shrug. After all, was there a mass exodus from Tejas after SB 8? Nope. A viable indication that Democrats will take over the state legislature and governor's mansion? Nope. The population there has acclimatized itself to having abortion effectively outlawed and life goes on. It’s especially telling that people seem to be relying on the response of corporate America: how more outsourced and lazy can you get than that?

And here’s the really salient part about this, one that I repeat all the time: in dictatorships, people still go to the movies. They go to sporting events. They still go to the theater or the opera, restaurants and bars. They accept the imposition of government control over their lives because there is nothing they can do. In our country, there is nothing people at large want to do. Oh sure, they vow to vote in the next election, but then you see it’s a major chore to get Democrats and Democratic supporters to show up. It’s too much work and there are other pressing concerns. And because we have normalized body counts to the point of ignoring them, citing the number of women who will have died as a direct result of Roe’s overturn will cause eyes to glaze over and just become white noise.

It's still weird to think that in 2022 in the United States of America, a legal right for half of the population is going to be taken away, but even weirder that too many will just accept it, make a vague promise to vote and then start watching the next episode of “Bridgerton.” I hope I am wrong, but I doubt that I am.