Joe Biden served America as 46th president. Does anyone wonder why Americans, many of them, never got to know him?
Joe, we barely knew ye.
Media billionaires pushed Joe off mainstream media channels; billionaire-bros algorithm-cleansed him from social media like X, Tic Tok, WhatsApp, Instagram et. al.
Right?
Worse, wealthy lunatics water-boarded Trump down our collective throats daily; hourly—for years! Who doesn’t reflexively puke when they look at a picture of that guy?
Why would owners of everything inflict a bad person like Trump on ordinary people? What toxic thing made Joe Biden loathsome to self-loving TITANS enuf that they felt free to offer we-little-ones alternative-Trump?
Has anyone other than Joe received as many freely-cast votes for anything anywhere during Earth’s short history of free-world civilizations?
Well?
Think about it.
The answer must be, “no”. Joe got 82 million votes: a feat not likely to be repeated for a long time.
So, what’s wrong with Joe?
Some say the debate proved him unfit. I challenge folks who think this way to watch the debate again.
BTW, why did Dems ditch Biden for a brownish woman who sensible folks must have known could not win election in slave-towns-everywhere USA?
Everyone knows that many Americans disrespect people they think are old. Worse, they hate blacks, foreigners, and women. Not everyone hates, but many do—nearing majority, it seems to me.
Who agrees?
Some say, we know, stupid.What else is new?
Well, people miss stuff when they don’t or won’t listen to folks who have lived thru hell. For me, I mistrust leaders who have no history of suffering. Who can respect the wisdom of folks who take but don’t give? Who trusts people whose judgment depends only on what they read in books or see in movies?
When Trump was a million $ in debt & on verge of bankruptcy, daughter Ivanka says they passed a beggar on the steps of one of daddy’s hotels. Beggar asked for money, which the Don refused. When Ivanka asked daddy, Why? he said the bum was a million dollars richer than him, because he had zero debt. The geezer with outstretched hand should give him money, he insisted.
Suffering is what all life endures. Who has watched geese fly south in winter? It’s beautiful until one sees that they race against time & weather. Many perish on the way. They drop from the sky and die. Opossums wander by and eat them.
Those who haven’t suffered haven’t learned anything useful when it comes to serving people, which is what good people try to do, at least sometimes, right?
Conspiracy theorists say that ICC-accused war criminal Netanyahu (PM of Israel) asked friends to force out Joe Biden, who some think he hates, in favor of Kamala Harris. In this way, he himself & Israel would secure protection from the International Criminal Court whether Trump or Harris won the US election or not. Regardless, Bibi wins both ways, though he admitted to favoring Trump, right?
We Americans, most anyway, will never learn truth about anyone as powerful as Benjamin Netanyahu or Donald Trump. Guardians of fake news think we can’t handle truth. If we could many of us wouldn’t believe it anyway.
Joe Biden is prolly the only person alive who was both able and motivated to stop the killing of women & children in Gaza, to prevent illegal seizures of Palestinian land, & to block ethnic-cleansing of non-Jews in Israel, which everyone on Earth sees plainly except US.
But Biden’s enemies put him in a box. At least they think they did. When he’s gone, leaders in Israel & Russia believe their ambitions for conquest could finally be unshackled.
They might be right. I’ve read that one in seven Israelis are Russian. The two countries share some overlap in cultural & world views, perhaps. Israel’s material support for Ukraine’s struggle to remain free is rumored to be meager at best.
Meanwhile, during the past few years, Israeli citizens complain they lost freedoms. Some say the judiciary is toothless in the face of autocracy—worse than America, they claim. Street protests are common, but news outlets rarely cover them. Democracy seems to be crumbling in real time according to a few of those who build their homes in the lands of the Bible & War Everlasting.
With the USA election decided, doors to more suffering and dying of nameless unloved people are flying open. A Pandora’s demonic box spills into the holiest places, both in America and lands faraway.
Christ said a time would come when killers believe they do favors for God. It was one more crazy thing Jesus said that led to crucifixion.
Who heard North Carolina’s Michele Morrow, candidate for Superintendent of Public Schools, call for Pay-Per-View public executions by firing squad of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Shumer, Anthony Fauci, Andrew Cuomo, Roy Cooper, Ilhan Omar, & Bill Gates?
Yes, Michele got 49% of the vote, but she didn’t win the statewide contest, thank God. In fact, every Republican running statewide in North Carolina lost except one and one other: Trump, of course.
And yes, most readers will likely say, true; they didn’t hear or read a single word about Michele Morrow. Didn’t know story myself until I saw Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reporting it while I wrote this essay.
Another true fact: Elon is considering purchase of MSNBC, presumably to shut-up reporters like Maddow who don’t trust Musk & his buddies to do what’s fair and right for ordinary Americans. Is the noose tightening? Steve Bannon, released from Danbury prison during the election a few weeks ago, says MAGA will hold power for 50 years, according to Newsweek.
What I learned is that young people, many of them, seem to think the following: old people are generally dumb, fearful, & demented; black folks, women, & migrants are usually repulsive; MAGA gun owners are freedom fighters; Israel is right about everything; Ukraine makes Russia do bad things; social security is a joke; inflation is raging; rich as hell people are almost always righteous.
I was at a party and overheard women in their thirties laughing at “blue hairs”. Respect for older women seems to have gone missing somehow in America.
It’s clear to me that young adults, most of them, don’t understand what it’s like to live old in America. They fear aging like it was leprosy, which for most it is not. Young adults are oblivious to the wisdom that comes only to those who age to the natural end of life, a process that can last a hundred years or more for some.
Oppressed people sometimes disdain people like themselves. It’s strange. Black men and white women voted for Trump, right? Migrants & gay men voted for Trump!
Acolytes who chase money, sex, & power surround the man. He’s a magnet for deplorables. Ask Hillary, a Christian woman he slimed.
In 2015, I suggested to a group of Christians that Hillary Clinton was Mother Teresa compared to Trump. They laughed, because they considered the idea absurd on its face. False stories about a woman who endured humiliation to protect love that comes only from a family united poisoned their minds.
Everyone must know it’s true. The weird part is that most seem unable to grasp how hatred works to hold them back.
Love is the answer, yes, but is anyone asking right questions?
People bet their lives they’re right, not wrong. Russian officials have threatened nuclear war nearly every day since the invasion of Kiev on 24 February 2022.
Right-questions-time died a long time ago.
Humankind and planet Earth now depend on Donald Trump and his team to safeguard everything we love. During transition of power, how the GOP behaves, what their leaders say and do, will have major impacts on everything that’s going to happen now and in the future.
Last time it was Covid. One million died, some experts say two.
No one listened to experts then or now.
Could things get worse this time around?
God in Heaven, hear this prayer:
Deliver Earthlings from all harm. Amen
NOTE FROM THE EDITORS: 19 August 2020. Billy Leeinforms us that tonight Kamala Harris gave best VP acceptance speech ever. He understands why Biden picked Harris for VP.
In spite of Billy Lee’s loss of skepticism, WE THE EDITORS insist his original essay stay in place to provide historical context for 2020 election.
People who read my blog know that I consider Trump a lunatic who is looting our country on behalf of his family and billionaires everywhere.
The irony of course is that his opponent just picked a VP who is married to one of the world’s wealthiest men — an attorney who may have made hundreds-of-millions representing billionaires in court. Kamala Harris claims they are worth together a mere $5.8 million.
I remember reading reports about her husband’s wealth being much more, but it was years ago, maybe it was fake news or the money has been moved, I don’t know. Anyhow, I cannot prove it today — mainly because much seems to have been rewritten on the internet about Kamala to make her palatable to voters.
That’s what it looks like from where I sit. In a few years everyone will know the truth, right? The truth always comes out, does it not?
Douglas Emhoff apparently made his money and powerful friends by helping certain oligarchs secure almost perpetual rights over intellectual property that they neither created nor are entitled to own overly long under the law; it is a battle about money and power that few regular folks know anything about.
Copyrights and patents expire for a reason — to prevent oligarchs from securing monopoly powers over the technologies and art that improve the lives of ordinary people.
Patents and copyrights expire to prevent the wealthy from securing for their families an infinite future of privilege they haven’t earned; to stop billionaires from becoming feudal lords in a country that prides itself on individual liberty and the innovation that comes from setting liberty free.
Copyrights and patents that are passed down from generation to generation — or sold to corporations to be held nearly forever — are un-American. Defending the unfair extension of such ownership in court is not an honorable way to make a living, at least to my way of thinking.
Today, oligarchs — the rich and powerful — are tightening their grip on countries around the world. People do not need a degree in political science to know that a 77-year-old man might not survive to see 20 January 2021, which is inauguration day. Joe Biden’s first major personnel decision has made it more likely that Kamala Harris will be president sooner rather than later.
Does Kamala Harris have the wisdom, maturity, pedigree, and experience to be president? These questions have to be asked, because it is possible Kamala Harris is going to be president soon.
By the time readers finish this post they will understand why I believe her ascent to power might not necessarily be too good for either the world or the United States. They will understand why I believe that Election 2020 is going to become a brawl between wealthy people who do not really care about us; the four candidates have almost nothing in common with ordinary people.
Media commentators on both left and right are parroting the same talking points. A black woman is running for VP. Isn’t that something?
The truth as I see it is far different. Kamala Harris is not a member of that group of suffering people in the United States whose great-grandparents were traumatized by slavery. She shares precious little experience with a people whose lives were torn apart by forced family separations, segregation, and Jim Crow.
Harriet Tubman. She knew all the players in the Underground Railroad. She was a spy for the Union during the Civil War. Bad things happened to her, but she never stopped fighting for what was right.
When Kamala claims she shared the black experience of racial discrimination because she took the bus to a school already integrated, she is misrepresenting her personal history by making it seem as though she suffered in some tragic way. Her story sounds phony. She comes across as inauthentic, at least to me.
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher from India. Shyamala passed, sadly, in 2009 from the disease she spent her life trying to understand. Kamala’s dad, Donald Harris, is a retired Jamaican economist who emigrated to the USA and worked at Stanford University in California where he holds the title of Professor Emeritus.
Kamala’s dad is the progeny of the prominent sugar baron and slave owner Hamilton Brown who was Irish. The heritage of Kamala’s dad is that of owner, not slave, plus he’s mostly white; indeed he’s Irish.
Kamala has many admirable qualities but a slave heritage is not one of them.
I think Biden might have picked Kamala because of their shared Irish ancestry. He says she and his son (who died) were close friends.
Kamala does not have the blood of American slavery running through her veins. Because of a sadistic repression, American slaves were unable to throw off their chains to free themselves like other slave populations in the Western Hemisphere. The cost was too high. The ancestors of some of my black friends had their bones broken, were castrated and boiled alive for trying.
Kamala does not share this history. My friends can speak for themselves. They don’t need me to tell their history. It doesn’t mean that they don’t take Kamala’s side against Trump, who is an existential threat to minorities because he is an unrepentant racist.
The feeling for me is that some will see little or no difference in the two tickets; the pundits will not be able to convince enough people to vote in 2020 to ensure that our current president relinquishes the power he seized against the popular will in the last election when minority voters, some of them, stood in line for six hours to cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton.
Trump lost the presidency by 11 million votes; 3 million of the margin went to Hillary Clinton; the rest to 3rd party candidates like Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders, and others.
Without a huge turnout of black voters, Joe Biden has no chance against Donald Trump. The president has already promised to challenge any election that doesn’t go his way. He has no plans to step down.
Shyamala and Donald Harris divorced when Kamala was 7; by age 12 Kamala moved to Canada with her mother. Kamala has more in common with Canadians than black Americans.
If Biden believes that Black Lives Matter, why did he not select the most qualified and prepared person he could find? Why not select Susan Rice whose dad Emmett J. Rice forged the original Tuskegee Airmen of World War Two?
Why did he not choose Val Demmings? — who Wikipedia says was ”one of seven children born to a poor family; her father worked as a janitor, while her mother was a maid.”
Ms. Demmings rose to become a Chief of Police in Orlando, Florida, of all places. She organized the impeachment hearings against President Trump. Who better to galvanize Democrats for Biden in the great state of Florida? — a state he is now likely to lose.
One thing that concerns me about Kamala Harris is the unfortunate circumstance of her not having birthed nor raised children of her own. Perhaps it wasn’t her choice. But it means that she lacks the wisdom common to women who birth and raise babies to adulthood. It gives them a dose of wisdom and experience that childless people including men don’t have.
It’s not something that can be easily minimized no matter how much we want it to not matter. I’m not trying to insult people who remain childless. But one reason to vote for a woman is to gather that wisdom common to mothers for the benefit of our country and its children. Kamala Harris doesn’t have it. We’re missing an important piece of the jigsaw that makes women good choices for leadership.
Another concern is the reports circulating on the internet that she is estranged from her father. I think it’s more likely that at age 82 he might not have his wits about him enough to manage a television interview. But he has criticized Kamala in the past for bragging about smoking high-quality Jamaican weed.
Professor Harris considered his daughter’s remark a self-aggrandizing slam against Jamaica’s reputation. She made it to garner support from pot-smokers, he said according to reports.
An inability to reconcile over disagreements about marijuana use seems far-fetched to me. I worry that hatred generated by some other issue might be at its root, and Americans should know what it is. It might be nothing at all. We need to know before we cast a vote that if it carries will change all our lives.
The reason is because anyone who can’t reconcile with their own family is not someone who should hold in their hands the briefcase of nuclear codes. It doesn’t matter who they are or who their family is. They can be the best person in the world. But it’s better that they be well-adjusted with a head unclouded by any desires for revenge; without any imagined scores to settle.
After all it’s the power of the United States that’s being entrusted. Every family has problems, but serious family problems are a red flag that voters are wise to consider. Voters have a duty to know as best they can the truth about a girl whose world was ripped apart by divorce at age 7 and again at age 12 when her mother moved her against her will to a cold, foreign land where she couldn’t speak the language (French).
Her only marriage was celebrated inside a courtroom during August 2016 to Douglas Emhoff, a single parent with two teenagers. It was a marriage that helped her career in politics, because it gave her access to a reservoir of money and the powerful friends of her husband.
Douglas Emhoff’s ex-wife is Kerstin Emhoff, the Hollywood and British film producer and co-founder of PRETTYBIRD and Ventureland. According to its website, ”PRETTYBIRD is one of the world’s most prestigious production companies in branded storytelling”. Apparently, Kerstin manages a stable of artists that number, I don’t know, in the hundreds, maybe?
Douglas, Kerstin, and Kamala behave like they are good friends both in public and on social media.
Maybe the court-approved union between Kamala and Douglas helped them avoid the awkwardness of a marriage ceremony normally held in temple or church when Kamala had no plans to convert to her husband’s religion nor he to hers. Neither did she intend to take on the mantle of his name — something as American as apple pie. Perhaps Kamala Emhoff didn’t ring the right tone in the ears of someone who was plotting strategies to grasp the golden ring of ultimate power.
Who doesn’t agree that the words Kamala Harris-Emhoff have a pleasant resonance? It’s like the smell of incense. It is. Who wouldn’t want the name if they had the opportunity to carry it?
Anyway, Kerstin Emhoff continues to carry her ex-husband’s name without any problems at all, apparently. Why do people make the decisions they do?
There is nothing wrong with a woman choosing to not carry her husband’s name. I personally wouldn’t marry a woman who made that choice, but it’s a personal decision that is none of my business unless it involves me personally. I don’t care one way or another when it comes to someone else’s marriage. What I’m worried about is that this “name thing” might be a way to camouflage a fortune in assets that Kamala doesn’t want the world to know about.
Or maybe her husband doesn’t want Kamala to know about his true worth. I wonder if the money is under the control of his ex-wife. Maybe there isn’t any money.
Who knows?
Not me.
But this power-couple is running for what is going to turn out to be the presidency. People kill for that kind of power. So I raise questions because someone has to. Hopefully the answers are innocent and nothing untoward or unseemly is going on behind the curtains.
If everything turns out to be on the up and up and folks are telling the truth, then we have nothing to worry about that can’t be fixed by experience and learning from one of the best — Joe Biden.
I don’t know Kamala, so I can’t ask her. Maybe someone close will ask about the circumstances of her marriage and her name when the subject comes up. Kamala is a major public figure now. Americans have a right and duty to know everything about her. It’s the price of power in a United States where leaders are expected to sacrificially serve ordinary people — not just the wealthy and the powerful like Trump so often seems to do.
Kamala doesn’t lay claim to a religion, but the Tamil region of India where her relatives live is primarily Hindu. Muslims, Christians, and Jains also live in the area. Her sister, MSNBC commentator Maya Harris, says that she and Kamala were raised in the Baptist and Hindu traditions.
Kamala Harris wrote in her book The Truths We Hold that she attended 23rd Avenue Church of God (a black Christian church) before moving to Canada. No problems there.
As for Trump, he also seems to have an unusual relationship with his spouse. It’s not because she was born two years after he graduated from college. No, it’s not that.
Apparently, Melania doesn’t live in the White House. For some reason no one has the courage to ask why. It’s not clear that Trump lives in the White House, either. He has a hotel across the street. I heard he has an entire floor to himself. No one ever asks him.
Maybe the same deference will be shown to the Harris-Emhoff family when Kamala becomes president in the next year or two. I don’t think it will, nor should it.
Who knows?
Not me.
I’m asking questions, nothing more, because this team of Biden and Harris doesn’t feel right to me. Something doesn’t add-up. Something isn’t making sense.
We know that Israel plans to annex the West Bank at its earliest opportunity. It’s what Haaretz and the Israeli press write about all the time. Perhaps Biden felt that Israel would be more acquiescent to his candidacy with Harris-Emhoff at his side. I just don’t know.
Annexation means possible war with powerful enemies. Is Kamala equipped to carry the fight? I don’t think she’s ready.
Editor’s Note:Within hours after we published this essay Israel announced an agreement with the United Arab Emirates. According to the New York Times, “…the two agreed to ”full normalization of relations” in exchange for Israel suspending annexation of occupied West Bank territory.” Palestinian authorities called the agreement a “sell-out” by the UAE.
Maybe someone will put their finger on why Demmings and Rice didn’t make the cut. Maybe cabinet appointments await them for which they are better suited. It’s speculation. It’s something to watch. Maybe Biden will tell us in the next few days.
Meanwhile, pig Trump snouts about for something nasty to engorge his advantage. Biden and Harris will have to become as meek as lambs and as smart as serpents. They might want to take an oath to keep their wits about them.
A significant portion of the voting public tends to be racist and misogynist — perhaps more now than ever, because of Trump. Kamala is a fighter who isn’t afraid to slash and burn when politics demands it. I wish a more righteous path could bring victory. I believe one exists, but I will never know for sure because my time on Earth is coming to an end.
Kamala made claim that both her parents were active in the American Civil Rights movement. As first-generation immigrant professionals, it’s difficult to understand why they would jeopardize their citizenship doing political acts that might prove disqualifying. In those days, Civil Rights leaders were labeled Communists by FBI Director Hoover. America blocked Communists from citizenship.
I hope Kamala is speaking truth. She might not know what the truth is. Maybe she romanticizes stories parents told. She wouldn’t be the first.
This contest is going to be cast by liberal media as a wrestling match between billionaire Trump and the little people represented by Biden and Harris. We’re in a carnival funhouse of mirrors, politically. Americans, many of them, always seem to feel that the next candidate, the next election will open a door that leads to their extrication from all the lunacy inflicted upon them by the wealthy and the power-hungry.
This election 2020 is not that election. The wealthy, well-connected, and powerful are here to stay into the foreseeable future. As Trump always says, It is the way it is.
Is it really true?
Some are advocating an election boycott — at the very least they plan to ignore the top of the ballot to send a message to the watching world that Americans are fed up by lousy choices and elites who refuse to defend and protect them.
I’m tired of throwing the dice to pick our leaders. We don’t know what we’re dealing with.
Or do we?
Trump is authentic but crazy. Kamala might be phony, but she’s smart as hell and in the prime of life. Which candidate will do the least harm to everything Americans believe in and defend?
I’m not sure anyone knows.
We don’t have much time to learn more about Kamala. We have to ask questions and move fast to understand her as best we can before putting her into a place where everything she says and does will affect our lives for good or ill.
I’ve watched elections come and go. One president in my lifetime was the poorest. He owned a peanut farm. He was the only president who never killed anyone or ordered anyone killed.
Everyone knows the name ”Jimmy” Carter, right?
I met him once. His righteous aura scared me almost to death.
The country spit him out like a bad seed.
Billy Lee
Postscript: 19 August 2020: Acceptance speech by Kamala Harris thrilled me. It was better than expected. I regret some portions of essay above, but my Editors have chosen to embarrass me by not allowing retractions or alterations.They have reasons.
Note from Editorial Board: Our policy is that everything Billy Lee writes be true. Opinions are fine, but fake facts are prohibited. When mistakes are discovered, it is policy that they be fixed ASAP. Meanwhile every issue raised in the essay is to be viewed not as statement of fact but as question begging answers. We agree it’s not enough to be anti-Trump. Hating Trump is not by itself qualifying. Caution advised.
Talking heads on MSNBC are calling the latest political developments involving the president a national emergency.
What’s going on?
The president nominated and the GOP is about to confirm a young conservative judge to sit on the Supreme Court who will make abortion illegal in all fifty states.
Everyone knows it’s coming.
The man’s name is Brett Kavanaugh. He seems to be a partisan hack — an ideologue who lacks common sense — but he’s smart and highly educated in conservative jurisprudence. Everybody says so, right?
He worked hard for Kenneth Starr to impeach President Clinton for lying to Congress about what at the time seemed to be a consensual extra-marital affair. Does anyone remember?
Ok, so what?
Well, the president who nominated him is a nut-job himself who can’t tell the truth, because he doesn’t know right from wrong; he has a mental disorder that renders him delusional, paranoid, and vindictive.
Trump sold folks a fiction that Barry Obama somehow misplaced his birth certificate — if found, it would prove he was a Kenyan usurper. As a candidate for president, Donny said that he had hired investigators to find the missing piece of paper. To this day, the president suspects that the document found was a forgery.
But he’s moved on, he says. Why don’t we?
Ok. So what?
[Note from the Editorial Board:On 6 October 2018, Donald Trump signed-off on the Senate’s confirmation of Kavanaugh to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.]
Trump introduced and elevated to super-stardom a very young man, Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. He enabled the kid to keep his atomic toys and to more effectively work to reunite his country with the south. The process of reunification is going on behind the scenes as I write.
Ok. So what?
A former CIA chief called the Korean summit, treasonous. The CIA chief no longer appears on TV. The president stripped his security clearance. He slapped him, somehow, off the public radar.
Ok. So what?
Some in the president’s inner circle have been indicted and pled guilty to more charges than anyone can name or count. The president replaces the unfaithful; turnover churns; life goes on.
Ok. So what?
A rotten, no-good coward — OK, someday they might make him/her a hero like they did John McCain — wrote an anonymous letter to the New York Times. The Times turned it into an “editorial”. The mole (or lion) works with a cabal of fellow travelers (or saviors of the Republic) inside the White House to unravel the president and disable his agenda.
Who wants to bet it was his Chief of Staff, John Kelly? Not me.
Ok. So what?
Christians meet daily to pray with the president to give him victory over his enemies, presumably. If the president falls, the vice-president Mike Pence will hold him up; he’ll carry-on the fight.
Ok. So what?
Tweeters, like myself, are being overrun by hoards of follower-bots. They aren’t real.
I look at who they follow — to make sure they are fake — then block them. (They seem to follow each other and a few other souls who actually are real — like me.) If I didn’t block, I’d have thousands of fake followers.
Note from the Editorial Board:No, the @BillyLeePontif on Twitter is not a hybrid form of artificial intelligence; Billy Lee is not an “AI BOT”, nor was he created by us. He was never sort-of-fake nor will he ever be.The Editors
“They” plan to make me and others like me unwilling and unsuspecting nodes in a huge network, which will light-up like a wildfire of California Christmas trees before the midterms to sway public voting through intimidation, threats, false tweets, and fake activity orchestrated by who? — public relations firms? — foreign governments? — trumpletonian hate groups? — Christian evangelists? — or all four groups working together (with Israel, of course) to finally conquer the world and secure the Holy Land for the Jewish refugees who still live there?
Is there anyone in Hell who knows what is going on and wants to tell someone?
Does anyone care?
Ok. So what?
I can’t be rambling. I don’t want to sound like a badly coded bot . I’ll lose my audience, correct?
Let’s get to it.
What is this emergency I am writing about, anyway?
It’s abortion. Only white supremacists, sycophants. and clowns in the president’s follower-base will stay behind to give him the time of day if he turns his heels to support a woman’s right to end her pregnancy. It’s that simple.
Can anyone make an argument for the president should he change his mind as he sometimes does to support the right of women to secure abortions? — because legal, free, and safe abortion was his position for years. Does anyone remember?
Does his head of yellow straw lose its luster if he betrays his pledge to capture and kill pregnancy-options in the USA?
Who knows?
Ok. Probably not.
Time to move on.
My hunch is that most people reading this essay do not remember living in the United States when abortion was against the law. They are too young.
I remember.
I remember the first time the word “abortion” appeared in a nationally syndicated magazine. I was in seventh grade. The word, which snuck its way into an issue of LIFE Magazine, created a sensation. Flood gates opened. Every news-outlet covered the story. For months, it was the only subject sophisticated people talked about.
I didn’t learn what the word meant until I was older and found an unabridged dictionary that defined it. After reading the definition, I still didn’t understand the word. In the United States of the 1950s and 1960s, many subjects remained off-limits and off-airways. When it came to sex and abortion, they were mysteries to children, certainly, but also to adults.
After the cultural revolution of the 1960s (which changed everything), it seems impossible for young people to believe that their country could be as naive as the USA once was. Young folks can’t imagine that the United States was a nation of mostly sheep who believed everything they read in books and magazines and everything they heard on the radio and watched on television.
It was a country with a vigorous right-wing press, but progressive views were scrupulously suppressed. No one explained what communism or socialism was, except to say that they were bad systems which existed in countries that wanted to destroy us. It was a time when citizens took everything their leaders said as absolute truth.
Believe it.
In 1968, I was a college sophomore who owned a convertible and a lot of spending money. At a party one night in early spring a beautiful girl I had met a few times came onto me. She boldly asked if I wanted to go upstairs and have sex with her.
I thought, I can’t make it with this beautiful girl unless I’m clean. I have to go back to the dorm and take a shower first. I told her, and she agreed to wait. After returning we went upstairs and made love.
I was slightly drunk and kind of scared — it seemed unnatural to be pursued by a pretty girl who had never shown interest in me before — but I went ahead and then it was over. I drove home and forgot about it.
The next weekend Alexa (not her real name, of course) called on the phone to tell me she was pregnant. I thought, wow! — now I can marry a beautiful woman. That’s a good outcome!
I asked her not to be afraid. I would take care of everything. Of course I would marry her and we would raise the child together. She could finish her education; I’d pay for it, and then I’d finish school after — while she took her turn caring for our child.
Suddenly she started crying. ”Oh Billy Lee” she sobbed. ”You are so honest and so kind. I can’t lie to you — I just can’t.”
”What are you talking about, Alexa?”
”The guy who made me pregnant is the drummer in the band at the club where I work. He hates me now and won’t speak to me.”
”You work at a club? What club?”
Well, enough voyeurism. The short version is she worked at a strip club where she was a go-go dancer employed by the band.
Ok. So what?
Well, the reason I’m writing this essay is to give people a picture of what getting an abortion was like fifty years ago when terminating a pregnancy was a crime in every state. It’s not clear that abortions will work in exactly the same way next year when the country circles back to once again make abortions illegal.
Drugs are available today that weren’t before. For less than twenty dollars a pregnant girl can purchase pills on the internet that will end her pregnancy. She can use bit-coin or other underground currencies to completely hide the transaction forever behind the most sophisticated encryption that organized-crime can devise.
She can ask her boyfriend to watch certain videos on the dark web. Voila! After an hour of viewing and the purchase of a few implements, he’s an abortion doctor.
When he’s ready, the termination of his girlfriend’s pregnancy will start its eternal journey down that rutted road to distant and forgotten memories.
In the 1960s, it was more difficult. Alexa set up a meeting with three doctors in an old house somewhere. She asked, and I tagged along. They signed some forms, which claimed that her life would be in danger if she carried her pregnancy to term. I drove Alexa to Maryland where we spent a week at the house of one of my dad’s friends who was in Europe at the time.
Alexa made an appointment at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, which was known to be a safe place where the doctors performed the procedure for women whose lives were in danger. Yes, it was expensive.
Her friends chipped in $600 — about $3,000 in today’s money. Though the hospital accepted her as a patient, the problem was that they wanted Alexa to return in three months. The abortion scheduling was crowded — booked solid. Alexa would be six months pregnant before it became her turn on the schedule.
Alexa and I decided to spend the week we had set aside for the hospital visit to go out each night to party in the Georgetown clubs in Washington DC — we ended up dancing and drinking away every dime of the money we had collected from her friends. Nightly, we returned to our borrowed house to make love with no worries about pregnancy.
It was liberating to love a beautiful woman unafraid of consequences.
I learned later that some in the neighborhood noticed the young couple coming and going at late hours from the house of their friend; they complained, but nothing came of it.
At week’s end we returned to our university where Alexa went to work on her friends to gather the money she needed for the final appointment. The school year would be over by then. Summer break was on its way. When she left on her second trip to DC three months later, she took the bus.
She knew what to do. She no longer needed me. The dress rehearsal was over. It wasn’t necessary for anyone to accompany her, she said.
I guess I don’t blame her.
As it happened, I became one of eighteen young men at the university who the government accepted into the army-officer training program that year. Over five-thousand applied in a futile effort to stay in school after the government ended draft deferments for college students — to better supply warm bodies to the killing fields in southeast Asia.
The army scheduled my training to start that summer in Georgia at Fort Benning. I couldn’t have been with Alexa, even if she wanted me, which she didn’t. In training, recruits were isolated in those days. Even a telephone call was impossible.
It turned out that it would be three-and-a-half years before I saw Alexa again. We ran into each other outside a steak house. She invited me to go inside and have something to eat.
She told me she owned a successful dance studio in Detroit. She looked amazing. She really did. She was happy. A good life lay ahead of her that would be full of all the good things that money from her business would buy.
I was dirty and unkempt. Again, I needed a shower, except worse. My clothes were rags, really. I explained that my military training didn’t end well. I became an anti-war protestor who spent maybe way too much time in the streets and the city parks. Someone put my car on blocks one night and stripped it of its MAG wheels and everything else of value.
I had no car.
I helped my friends organize demonstrations; I wrote unpaid copy for an anti-war newspaper. After resigning a pending officer’s commission (with the full support and encouragement of the Army) I dropped out of the university to fight the good fight against the Vietnam war and racism. I bussed tables a few hours a week in the same restaurant I once managed. Financially, I wasn’t doing well.
Alexa interrupted; she touched me on the arm and leaned-in to thank me for helping her that one time years ago when she needed a friend she could trust.
I felt unworthy. I felt shame. She was too good for me. This time in her expensive clothes and me in my filthy jeans, it was obvious to us both.
She paid for my meal and said good-by for the last time.
