Written on June 25th, 2022, the following lines were my attempt to contribute something meaningful in a moment of total dread. It is not timely, nor is it timeless, but even now I think about one of the final lines, about a woman I will never meet, nor will I even know existed. This text is dedicated to her and to the millions of little things that have been stolen from her. This cause is not hers alone, because it is the cause of all humanity.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Slavery did not end on its own. It was the outcome of a long struggle that saw midwestern German immigrants and New England Quakers become morally outraged by slavery, slaveocrats, and their liberal apologists who insisted on legal processes. But even after 1860, they were in the minority. They founded a party, splitting from the Whig’s slave-owning apologetics, and — after a long struggle — elected Lincoln, over the howls of reactionary, Bonapartist, and proto-fascist southerners and their liberal apologists. But it was not enough. It was the reactionary south that escalated the conflict, believing that moral outrage could not justify 600,000 deaths. But it did.
McClellan and his copperhead Democrats agreed in 1864. These liberal apologists did not believe that ending slavery was worth the price; that there was a limit to moral outrage. It was only when ballots from the soldiers of the Union army came in that they were proven wrong. The fighting men of the Union had seen slavery up close and they were committed to ending it. Their cause was priceless because it was humanity.
The Supreme Court has just overturned Roe v. Wade. Women will die because of it. But this decades-long project is only part of the reactionary right’s desperate cling to power. In the 1850s, Republicans abandoned the right’s apologists, we must do the same. Voting and exile are not enough. We are outraged. We must act.
The struggle to destroy slavery was not to improve the material conditions of northern workers, they fought to end slavery because they knew it was wrong; they were morally outraged. For us (men), it should be no different. That outrage caused northerners to volunteer; we must do the same. This is the fight of our mothers and sisters, our friends and our lovers, of a woman we will never meet, nor will we ever know even exists. It is the cause of all humanity because women’s rights are human rights. I am outraged, you should be too.
The reactionary right must be stopped. The struggle will be vicious, but like those 700,000 Union volunteers that came before us, we are outraged.
Normal Thoughts 