by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
If my fears come true and “fetal personhood” becomes mainstream Republican orthodoxy by the time the 2024 election rolls around, holy shit does it seem like my “hysterical doom shit” is pretty prescient. Abortion and gun control are two issues very clearly mark if someone — or their state — is Red or Blue. And if Republicans embrace the idea that a zygote should be afforded all the Constitutional protections of an adult person…YIKES.
This is a prime example of why I fucking hate radicalism. If you’re so radical in your dreams of banning abortion that you pretty much make it inevitable that women will go to prison for having a miscarriage then you’re a piece of shit. But here we are — it could be that 2024 will be a battle royale between Two Tribes where no matter who wins the election, we face a secession crisis.
Either Reds begin to leave the Union because Blues won or Blues leave the Union because Reds won. There will be no middle ground and we will all be faced with the biggest historical event since the French Revolution. For all the people trying to “save” babies by having an absolute ban on abortion, I’d like to know what they’re going to do when a Second American Civil War combined with WW3 causes the death of about 1 billion people because of various horrible things happening in quick succession.
And, yet, it could very well be that Blues don’t have it in them to leave the Union. It could be that all those smug Twitter liberals with podcasts will decamp to the south of France and that will be that. There will be a national contraception ban, all gun control will be overturned and the existing ICE camp system will be weaponized to the point that yours truly finds himself cooling his heels in one of them for getting drunk and saying the autocrat can suck his dick.
The issue is — I can’t predict the future. I have no idea what is going to happen, but I am growing more and more alarmed that the existential choice of autocracy or civil war that I’ve been ranting about for some time really is going to happen.
I don’t that to happen over and above the obvious reasons because I have a novel I’m working on and I’d like to actually have a fair shot of becoming a successful, published author before I drop dead.
Who knows? Anything can happen in the next 18 months or so.
