Maybe it was the French. Watching this spring as they erupted in protest—grinding their own cities to a halt, disrupting mass transit, letting trash pile up, torching their president's favorite restaurant—over the specter of pension reform made us feel a bit...sheepish.
Our own previous spring had brought the most devastating setback to American women's rights in half a century. The Supreme Court's decision on Dobbs leaked in early May of last year, then landed with a miserable thud in late June. People marched in front of government buildings in big cities and small towns across the country, crowds gathered in front of the Supreme Court, students staged walkouts, and activists yelled outside the private homes of Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh.
But the backlash felt so modest compared to the gravity of the loss. The most dispiriting reaction came from our pro-choice elected leaders, who offered neither a roadmap to fix this nor an appropriate sense of outrage: President Biden issued an enraging statement the morning after the leak that simply suggested people vote for pro-choice leaders later that year. House Democrats rushed through several bills protecting abortion access, with the full knowledge they'd all fail in the Senate, which of course they did. And in July, Biden signed a lifeless executive order instructing the Health Department to give doctors legal advice and to look into that whole period-tracking-app data thing. He acknowledged that abortion access couldn't be enshrined without more pro-choice leaders in charge (like…himself?!) and again told folks to vote. Come fall, our initial ire felt like it was morphing into numb exhaustion. |
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