The other night I was driving south on Harrison Street back to the Mission. I’ve been doing a final round of visits and dinners with friends in San Francisco before I return to Santa Fe on Thursday — this time with no loose ends. (I cannot wait to return for real! I have a wonderful new tenant who moves in this weekend.)
It’s not easy for me to write a love letter to San Francisco. As you know, it’s been a tough city to love in the last few years and months. (Although this brilliant piece in The Atlantic did a great job capturing the contradictions and complexity of this city.)
So there I was at the intersection of Sixth and Harrison, waiting for the light to change. On one side of the street is the End Up, a dirty dive bar from the Way Back Machine, and on the other side of the street a graffiti sign “Stop men.”
And for a moment, I felt a micro-surge of love for San Francisco and its unrepentant pole position as the most liberal city in America. I loved the idea that someone with a canister crawled up to this sign and spray-painted that. Simple, no harsh expletive, to the point.
UPDATE: A friend informed me this piece of graffiti is the work of artist Xara Thustra and is also at the former location of The Stud, where a graffiti-off a thing. Now, it’s extra extra lovable.
We need more of that right now following a month of conservative rulings from the Supreme Court where the winners are: men, greed, and guns. Who lost? women, people of color, the environment, and public safety. Stop men. Seriously, it’s that simple. Stop it. The patriarchy needs to end now.
Politics has been in the backseat to this whole idea of moving and finding Home. Or at least I have not brought it up as an explicit filter. There is, of course, an unspoken agreement probably with everyone reading this blog that we’d never want to live in a deep red state. (Santa Fe is blue in case you’re wondering; southern New Mexico is red.)
But increasingly it feels like Do I even want to live in this country? Will we see a great flight of the intellectual class? Did I Google how long it would take to naturalize as a British citizen? (Also this is a very creepy story about how conservatives are taking pages from the Viktor Orban playbook.)
Even as we have been in a prologue to civil war since November 2016, I never doubted my ability to live with total authority over my own selfhood — until now. My feelings and late-stage fertility, however, don’t matter. What matters is that young women in red states are now chattel, enslaved by law, and forced to carry on with a pregnancy they do not want, cannot afford, and never asked for! But since we don’t regulate sperm providers … And to put a fine point on it, it’s mostly Black and Latina women who are affected by the overturning of Roe v Wade.
It remains to be seen how an Executive Order and other rulings effectively can create workarounds, but the real issue is a pure systemic power consolidation by the far right. It gets at the heart of individual freedom and equal rights — (some) men are free, (all) women are not. The fundamentalism of conservatives is so profoundly self-serving, hypocritical, and out of touch with any reality related to the actual citizenry (those are my polite words), plus gerrymandering, that I have basically lost any faith in the high court and maybe even government. (Also worth listening to this Ezra Klein podcast on how judicial supremacy takes root in times when the executive and legislative branches are weak.)
Maybe the small silver lining here is that disengagement will turn into engagement.
My graffiti sign?