Roe is going away. That was crystal clear from the nature of the reporting today. The fact that the court makeup has changed is a green light to bring cases that can be used to wipe their ass with stare decisis and precedent is officially meaningless.
That’s the problem. The structural obstacles are to action. One side believes in action, and the other side believes only in thwarting whatever the first side wants. Health care for all, or at least for more? A hundred bills to repeal it. Fair elections? Gerrymandering and foreign interference and actual physical insurrection to derail them. Public health, or at least not to have hundreds of thousands of people die from a virus? There will be war. On vaccines, on masking, on anything that might save people – even if it means disproportionate sickness and death among their own numbers.
Normal service is gone. People who worried about preserving the existing norms and rules miss the point: there is no going backward. You can’t un-ring the bell, you can’t un-break the branch. Damage can be repaired, but not undone.
It’s a lesson I’m struggling to learn myself, as one thing after another gets whittled away. You have to repair or replace, and it’s not always easy, and it absolutely will not go back to the way it was, and it’s possible that the future is just learning to live with ever less and trying to build a cocoon capable of actually keeping the world out.
But the world keeps coming for you. And at some point, you have to accept that your best case scenario is to ameliorate as much of the harm as you can.