TIME TRAVEL WITH BULLIES BEING BULLIES

Time travel with me back fifty years.

Here’s why:

Fifty years ago I was a seventeen year old student following the stream from Miss Spooner’s kindergarten classes at Roosevelt to graduating on the football field where my sports heroes played.

It was a good run.

What I learned there has guided me ever since. Some of it came in the classroom, some in sports.

I learned about getting bullied, then being a bully. But I was a fair bully, which reminds me of Dexter since I tried to bully bullies.

All in all that stuff was a normal day in the Bulldog wrestling room with the national coach of the year, and worth taking forward.

A Short Time Travel Later

January 22, 1973 was the breakthrough date for women being bullied in America.

That’s the date Roe v Wade was decided, based on answering this question:

Does the Constitution recognize a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy by abortion?

The case

In 1970, Jane Roe (a fictional name used in court documents to protect the plaintiff’s identity) filed a lawsuit against Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas, where she resided, challenging a Texas law making abortion illegal except by a doctor’s orders to save a woman’s life. In her lawsuit, Roe alleged that the state laws were unconstitutionally vague and abridged her right of personal privacy, protected by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

Texas? Did you know Roe v Wade was a Texas case? You’re welcome. (Neither did I, but now we know.)

My Momma was a Texas girl. So was my Grandma. She moved away during WWII after marrying a man from the Northwest. She took her ten year old daughter from her first marriage with her.

Grandma wasn’t an unfortunate widow.

A divorce in the later 1930’s came after this announcement: “Darling, the boys at the shop told me all about women being pregnant so you can relax. I’ve got the lady down the street lined up for sex.”

Just boys being boys like all boys with women of a certain kind. My Grandma wasn’t that kind of woman.

Staying married to the local bone-king wasn’t her style, but she got pregnant again.

Needless to say, Roe v Wade in Texas was decades away, but good women married to husband-bullies still found a way. Some lived to tell about it.

The Big Leap Backward For Time Travel

Yesterday, June 24, 2022 was a different landmark day for Roe v Wade and women’s reproductive health.

It’s a day to mark the beginning of brave women like my Grandma, those who possess the spirit of personal freedom, to stand up to the men and women who don’t.

To top it off, it was also the day for RENT at Portland Center Stage. Talk about a shocking coincidence.

First it’s news of misguided men and women deciding they want their hands in deciding what women’s reproductive health is, then a musical about the same kind of people turning away from the AIDS crisis in the early years.

They are both bully moves. Time travel never leaves bullies behind, people who resent being told what to do, but wallow in the excitement of telling others what to do.

The way to identify them is the shit-fit they throw when they don’t get the results they want.

Between January 1973 and June 2022, what has changed?

Nixon was unraveling in ’73; Trump continues to unravel in ’22.

Someone found an empty tub in 2016, filled it up, painted it up, and parked it front of microphone.

His handlers gave him orders, he fulfilled them, and the now it’s time travel on the express train backward for the benefit of who?

Not women tired of being told what they can and can’t do.

How will they answer in response?