I guess the good news is that someone still has a heart! And, it’s a dude who thinks women are people, no less!

Once upon a time my heart would have fluttered, but now it almost seems quaint, a mildly heartwarming relic of an earlier time, back when some states even had more than one abortion clinic. Because NARAL, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, N.O.W., the Democratic Party, and even dudes who think women are people have all utterly failed millions of women and girls in this country, for decades. Oh sure, they fought nobly. A+ for effort. But it’s just a fact that their strategies have continued to fail during all this time as the landscape of reproductive freedom has become ever more barren. And yet, as they’ve continued to observe their strategies and tactics fail time and again, those failed strategies and tactics have not adapted.

At one point, I took this problem into my own hands. Along with a few friends, I started collecting and mailing wire coat hangers in padded envelopes to every person in a state’s legislature that voted for a draconian abortion restriction. The packages all included a letter explaining that we were providing this handy, helpful and now necessary tool free of charge for their wives, daughters, female friends and family members, and in the case of women legislators, for themselves. It’s been a while, but iirc we signed it “The Coathanger Lobby.”

We’d get a few inane responses, returns-to-sender, maybe a little local press in, like, South Dakota or wherever. But eventually this got too expensive and time-consuming to keep up. I began having my gynecologist take a picture of my cervix (and surrounding vaginal walls, with speculum gleaming) at my annual exam. I’d send color prints of that image to such congresscritters, with a lovely note informing them that since they were so deeply and sincerely concerned with what went into and came out of my vagina and cervix, I just knew they would appreciate seeing documentation that mine were perfectly healthy. You know, for their soon-to-be-required official registry of same.

Eventually I gave up on that too, which is just as well since after my bonus total hysterectomy that came with my second colon cancer surgery at no extra cost to me, I no longer possess a cervix to document.

I did come up with a third tactic, which happened to take the form of a blog page at my old digs. I am thinking of doing a Grand Reopening here, since it was less work, more fun, and Death to Squirrels readers might enjoy participating. (I have some pressing deadlines, but stay tuned for that.)

My point is that at least I kept trying something different; although, since very few people took notice it’s impossible to draw any conclusions as to whether these tactics might have moved the needle if they were deployed on a much wider scale. See, I strongly disagree that polite, reasoned, non-confrontational approaches to this issue will have any meaningful impact on rude, irrational, confrontational misogynists. For example, I can think of five Supreme Court Justices who, every time they leave their homes, should not be able to escape seeing this picture. [CONTENT NOTE: extremely graphic image of Geraldine Santoro taken in 1964 by police who found her dead after a botched attempt at self-aborting.] The only thing “civil” attempts at persuasion accomplish is allowing sadistic misogynists to continue pretending that picture does not capture exactly what they are doing. Everyone who supports these laws should be forced to see it, and regularly.

And yet, when people like my friend Sansara Taylor and her revolutionary communist peeps organize cross-country bus tours to show up at rallies and protests with messaging like this…

… they get all kinds of pushback from protesters associated with the more well-known organizations for “doing more harm than good,” for being “counterproductive” and “outsiders” who “drown out the voices of local activists” (yes, those would be the very same activists who put out the nationwide calls to attend these rallies in the first place), and worse. They get shunned, shoved aside and dismissed because of their in-your-face, not-so-civil messaging, by their “civil”-tongued comrades. This is not only enraging, but so demonstrably, painfully and obviously wrong-headed. And I have only one thing to ask in response: how’s all that civility been workin’ for ya?

SPOILER ALERT! It’s not. It never has, and it never will.

Okay that’s just silly. Our politicians do not think of us AT ALL (with a precious few noteworthy exceptions). Well, except as targets of relentless begging for small-dollar donations. You know what? This doesn’t make any sense to me. The Dems are equally as beholden to Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil as the GOP is; I just can’t imagine the millions of emails Chuck Schumer blasts out daily bring in more than a tiny fraction of a single phone call to a big bank’s CEO.

LOL @ Atwood in a bar fight, kicking some misogynists’ asses like a goddamn superhero. Ms. Atwood, your next beer’s on me.

Last, since my own heart is presently out of service (again? still?), all black and shriveled in an autonomic response to the latest horrors and grotesqueries our species is compelled to inflict upon itself, I present you with…someone else’s heart:

image: Ben Jackson via AP

(via AP):

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — An Australian farmer couldn’t go to his aunt’s funeral because of pandemic restrictions so he paid his respects with a novel alternative: dozens of sheep arranged in the shape of a love heart.

Drone-shot video of pregnant ewes munching barley in a paddock while unwittingly expressing Ben Jackson’s affection for his beloved Auntie Deb was viewed by mourners at her funeral in the city of Brisbane in Queensland state this week.

…

Jackson started experimenting with making shapes with sheep to relieve the monotonous stress of hand-feeding livestock during a devastating drought across most of Australia that broke in the early months of the pandemic.

Oh yeah, I heard about that mouse plague in Australia! How horrifying!

Could have been much, much worse tho. Could have been… squirrels.