Member-only story
I Think I Found the Antidote to 21st Century Fascism…We Just Have to Go Back to the 90s to Get It
It’s time to let the billionaires go their own way, while we remember the simple joys of real life
We’ve been lucky. I don’t think I understood just how lucky. Perhaps especially the Baby Boomers (or at least the male Boomers) and Gen Xers. Yes, even we prickly, pessimistic Xers.
We have been lucky.
You might say my generation grew up in the golden age of Roe v. Wade. The halcyon days of folk singers on the record player and telephones that were plugged into the walls.
Like many white people, I didn’t understand how lucky I was. Sure, I spent my life navigating men’s condescension and sometimes violence. But I generally felt as though I lived in a country where at least my life mattered — something I later came to identify as a privilege of my skin color.
Our new administration has made it a little clearer what it’s been like for other American women all along. Now white women are getting just a glimpse of what it feels like to know we aren’t safe, and that our lives (and by that, I mean our literal existence in an animate body) absolutely do not matter to the people governing us.
