What Can You Do; Do What You Can; What You Can Do.

I said the other day, “current events are going to happen.” It was meant to be a joke, a slightly-snide commentary on the news cycle, and above all, the truth. I was referring to the method behind maintaining a backlog of posts on this website so that if anything should knock me down for a while, I would have runway to use before I ran out of posts. I thought current events, if they were significant enough, would push my backlog of posts out a few days so that I could give myself space to write my thoughts on whatever might be affecting me or my state, country, or home.

One of those events came sooner than I wanted, though it wasn’t much of a surprise, given previous leaks. The Supreme Court in the United States overturned Roe v. Wade, a landmark case decided in 1973 that guaranteed women the right to choose to have an abortion under the constitution. A follow-on case in 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, upheld that decision. Three decades later, they have overruled both of those decisions, holding that there is no constitutional right to an abortion.

Thousands of others have said it better; if life is what we are protecting, banning abortion is not the way to do that, and yet… here we are again. The decision by the Supreme Court puts the onus back on the states to create laws surrounding the issue, and my state is very likely to ban abortion.

It’s disheartening and truly terrifying to say the least. Other decisions that could be overturned in this same way are the right for same-sex marriages and access to birth control. To me, the state of the country feels a lot less solid now, though it felt spongey at best before.

So what can I do? I’ll do what I can. Below are some resources that I’m using to help myself navigate this reversal, if you’d like to join me. In the in-between times, I’m going to be taking care of myself. Times of turbulence are the times it’s easiest to forget ourselves. We can’t save the world if we can’t save ourselves first. Stay safe, friends.

What You Can Do:

28 June 2022 current-events womens-rights

Naming My Houseplants Any houseplant person can tell you that their plants have personality. I’m not sure when I started dealing with my own on that level, but soon

Test-Talking I love this phrase: “test-talking.” I first heard it from Tiff Arment on Make Do, a delightful podcast about making and doing creative things, and

What Can You Do; Do What You Can; What You Can Do.

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