Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Three)

            After my righteously unhinged encounter with the MAGA couple, Amy and I crossed the street from the Capitol and joined the biggest of the three crowds, in front of the Supreme Court itself. As we joined the throng, they were chanting my very favorite:

“Shut! It! Down!”

            I let so much fury out into those chants that even Amy, who has known me at my very best and VERY worst, looked a little surprised/impressed. I fully embraced the shrill, hectoring harpy-ish ness of my voice, let it all out into the sky with thousands of other rape survivors and our brave allies. The pain and anger that I screamed with felt like it came from the very center of the earth, as if I was screaming as nature herself, which is of course what’s really at stake here.

            In the midst their sadism, their selfishness, their entitlement, Kavanaugh supporters also call themselves “pro-life” and I don’t think anything could be further from the truth. What I see (what I always HAVE seen) in every single one of the Republican policies—from forced pregnancy to caging children to deregulating the environment, is a ruthless, bloodthirsty hatred for life itself.

            And I just realized why: Life, like justice movements, can’t really be controlled. It seeds and prevails itself in millions and billions of chaotic, mysterious, and ravenously resilient ways. Just like this protest’s voice and Dr. Ford’s voice and Anita Hill’s voice and Mamie Till’s voice, life is unstoppable. It’s a vine that keeps seeding itself, keeps sprouting and spreading in insurmountable ways, ways that make white colonialist patriarchs NERVOUS. As long as there is life, as long as there is VOICE, there’ll be something they can’t control. I think that’s where white male supremacists of both/all political parties get their horrible, bloodthirsty nihilism. They have to be stopped.

            So the fury that was coming out of me that day felt both firmly grounded and out of control—at no point for the rest of that day did I stop scaring myself. I decided that I wanted to go up the Supreme Court steps to see the crowd and stake my claim, to plant my feet. When a policeman told me I couldn’t bring my sign up there with me, then told me again after I tried to put down my sign and go up, I got in his face:

“Because GOD FORBID I should want to express myself IN AMERICA.”

            Cliché but true. I felt frustrated with myself for not having a handle on my emotions, but jangled fury seems like the perfect emotion with which to stand on the Supreme Court steps, glaring at America and looking lovingly at the crowd as they chanted:

“We! Believed! Anita then! We! Believe! Christine now!”

            This is my country. Our country, and we are SICK OF YOUR FUCKING NONSENSE. But even/especially on this wild, explosive, feminist day, there was SO MUCH MORE nonsense to come.