Ungovernable

My circle of loved ones has a longstanding July 4th tradition of circling up, sometime between the pie and the fireworks, to read the Declaration of Independence aloud. Over the years this ritual has proved to be challenging but fruitful, as we ponder, together, the contradictions in our nation’s founding – and in its founders. We face the injustices baked into our roots. We renew our commitment to the flickering, fragile ideals that we have yet to achieve, but that are worth fighting for.

The last few years have been rough on the flickering, fragile ideals front. Meredith and I once had to retreat to a large cardboard box after the reading, having lost the will to carry on. Another time we substituted excerpts from “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?”, a speech Frederick Douglass gave in 1852, which turned out to be challenging and fruitful in a whole nother way. 

This year I've once again found myself fresh out of reasons to celebrate my country, and have made plans to spend the holiday weekend in a neighboring one. But in between packing my bags and finishing up a long work week, I decided to pull out Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments” – the document everybody signed at the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in 1848 – just to see how it might hold up in the light of the various garbage fires blazing around us in 2022.

We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. 

So far so good. That “and women” is a small insertion, but it makes a huge difference to see my gender explicitly included up front, instead of having to project half the human race in between these opening lines.* Stanton continues, mirroring Jefferson’s prose:

Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes… But when a long train of abuses and usurpations… evinces a design to reduce [a people] under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

 This part frankly gave me pause. I’ve always heard these words as a soaring call to responsible citizenship: We can’t stand idly by when our government is actively harming people; we have a moral obligation to right our nation’s wrongs. But now all I can think of is guys with flagpoles breaking through the windows of the Capitol building. Of course the January 6th riot was built on fabricated abuses and fictional usurpations – but it’s not hard to imagine the shoe on the other foot one of these days. Will we be surrounding the Capitol in our turn, desperately trying to keep an illegitimate president from being sworn in, or an unjust ruling from taking effect? I want to be sure we can do it nonviolently, with a decent respect to the opinions of humankind.

Jefferson and Stanton both justify their demands for a new form of government by enumerating specific abuses committed by the old one. This seems like a solid rhetorical strategy – though in this age of alternative facts and polarized ideological identities, I have little faith that even the strongest evidence can build solid support for the kind of change we need. 

Like Jefferson's, Stanton's list of grievances includes a few cringe-worthy moments. The lady had her prejudices and blind spots, as white feminists from privileged backgrounds often did – and still do, myself included.** 

She also had a lot of 100% legit complaints, which she laid out with passion and eloquence. I am happy to report that some of these have since been addressed. Stanton herself did not live long enough to cast a ballot, for instance – but I have been voting proudly since Mike Dukakis got trounced back in 1988. Colleges are no longer closed against us, thanks to Patsy Mink and Title IX. I can own my own property and keep my wages, such as they are. So yes, we've made progress – and I’m grateful. 

There were, however, several items on the list of man’s repeated injuries toward woman that still resonate 174 years later. Here are a few:

He has created a false public sentiment, by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.

He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.

This last one hit a raw nerve, after last week's Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. It seems to me that choosing one’s own sphere of action is central to the exercise of liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and basic human dignity.  Deciding where you will spend your time and energy, the responsibilities you will shoulder, the goals you will pursue, the course your life will take – we don’t get to control all of these things, obviously, and some of us have more ability to control them than others. But a world where someone else decides this stuff for you, where you don't get the choice to exercise your own judgment in these matters? This is where Dobbs v. Jackson has taken millions of women, with the stroke of a pen.

When I found myself accidentally pregnant in my early 20s, I knew having a baby at that moment would change the course of my life in ways I didn’t want it to change. I consulted with my conscience and my (personal conception of) God, and decided that this particular little spirit would get sent back to join the swirling energy of the Universe, paving the way for the children I did want to have – and would go on to have, a few years later. Thanks to Roe, I had easy access to a safe, legal medical procedure that allowed me to undo the consequences of a moment of careless passion. My abortion wasn’t a fun experience, exactly, but I certainly haven’t missed that unborn baby. Neither, I’ll wager, has anyone else. 

I realize now how lucky I have been, living my whole reproductive span in a time and place (and with the resources and support) where this was all a given. When my mother discovered she was pregnant a couple of years before I was born, she had to seek out an illegal abortion; my daughter’s reproductive choice is now limited by geography, and may shrink further in the years to come. I don't need to outline the ever-increasing barriers to abortion that pregnant people in red states have faced in recent decades, or the brutal policing of women's bodies that has disproportionately affected BIPOC and poor people for centuries. We know that the fall of Roe will make life a thousand times harder for millions of people who are already suffering – and who cannot shoulder the burden of another painfully slow legal and political battle on top of everything else they're dealing with. I don't know where I will find the will to carry on this time around, but as Bryan Stevenson says, "Hopelessness is the enemy of justice," and so carry on I will.

I will miss our neighborhood 4th of July celebration this year – the ribs, the pie, the circle of family and friends reading 18th-century prose, the DIY fireworks lighting up the sky late into the night. But I will take some time to acknowledge the progress we have made toward Jefferson's radical vision of equality, and to honor the many valiant, brilliant, flawed human beings who worked so tirelessly to get us this far. I will remember that patriarchy and white supremacy often intertwine to set us against each other and stall our collective liberation. I will recommit to examining my own biases and defensiveness, while still speaking my truth.  

And I will continue to ponder the moral and strategic questions posed by our nation’s founding document, as we chart the path forward from here. Our present form of government has failed to secure our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – and has, for many of us, become destructive of these ends. What is the mechanism for instituting a new government – or radically reforming the one we’ve got? How do we establish the consent of the governed, when we can’t agree on basic facts? 

One of the rallying cries I’m hearing at abortion protests these days is “WE WILL BE UNGOVERNABLE!” I definitely prefer it to the delusional “WE WON’T GO BACK!”*** There’s this thrill of People Power about it – you can almost see the masses rising up, taking over the streets… But then what? What do we want to do with all that power? How will we structure its deployment? Being ungovernable may be an exhilarating and crucial step in the process, but honestly, in the end I want my country to be governed. Fairly. With compassion and foresight and evidence-based policies. By a government that fucking works. For that, I would pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor. Such as it is. 

*And yes, we need to extend that invitation to nonbinary, genderfluid, and gender nonconforming folks as well. Eventually we may get to the point where the word “people” covers it, but right now I am feeling the need to shout out the people whose claim to equality is currently under attack.)

**In this case there’s an unfortunate reference to the “ignorant and degraded men – both natives and foreigners” who have been given civil rights ahead of the educated, respectable women she considered more deserving. Note that this document was written 20 years before the 14th Amendment granted the franchise to formerly enslaved men, while explicitly excluding women; Stanton’s bitterness at this betrayal did not improve her capacity for intersectional analysis, alas.)

***SCOTUS: “Hold my beer.”