Time Tunnel

How are we free, under these circumstances?
How can any of us be free?

— Roxane Gay

If you're over 55, you know time travel is possible, because you saw it every week on The Time Tunnel.

If you pick up your TV Guide, you'll learn that in this week's episode a gang of right-wing lunatics wearing black robes seized control of the Time Tunnel and have set our destination for the year 1800.

So you can say goodbye to women's rights—including the vote. To gay and interracial marriage. And to civil rights, equal rights, privacy rights, workers' rights, and the emancipation. 

Those liberties all stemmed from Liberals' delusions.

Say hello to women in their place at the workbench; to gays in the closet; to workers working 70-hour weeks; and to Blacks back out in the cotton fields.

Writing yesterday in The New York Times, opinion columnist Roxane Gay praised the unnamed individual who leaked the Supreme Court's draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

"Whoever leaked it wanted people to understand the fate awaiting us."

She's absolutely right about that: women are about to lose "bodily autonomy."

But—being young—Gay does not understand that this is only the beginning of the ride, and that five crazed justices have seized the dials which control the Time Tunnel.

Fasten your seatbelts, folks.

"I do not know where this retraction of civil rights will end," Gay writes, "but I do know it will go down as a milestone in a decades-long conservative campaign to force a country of 330 million people to abide by a bigoted set of ideologies."

I do know where the retraction of civil rights will end: the year 1800, the last year White American men of wealth called the shots.

In those men's eyes—as in the five reactionary justices' eyes—America went decidedly downhill after that.

Most Americans today have their heads in the sand, to put it nicely.

They're ignorant and naive, and don't know why we enjoy the many civil liberties we do.

They don't know that Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 by persuading votes that rich White men, if unchecked, could—and would—eventually enslave everyone.

They don't know that female "shirtwaist workers" in 1900 dodged bullets and beatings to form a union.

They don't know who Elizabeth Cady Stanton was, or that Jim Crow wasn't a brand of whiskey. 

They don't know what the Stonewall Riots were; or that, before 1973, a coat hanger was the customary means for aborting a fetus.

But they're about to learn. 

We all are.

We're about to relive all those events and more on the next amazing episode of The Time Tunnel.

POSTCRIPT: Okay, I hear you saying, "He's cra-cra." But, trust me, the Constitution is no match for five right-wing lunatics bent on turning back the clock. The justices can—and will—overturn not only prior Supreme Court decisions, but Constitutional amendments as well. Under the 5th Amendment, they hold that power. They will surely use it.