I thought of her as white until someone here mentioned the issue. Perhaps this is because I live in a rural area with hardly anyone who is not white, but with a great deal of poverty.
Funny, as I read it I didn’t see the woman and her daughter as white or black. I saw her as that new, tattooed, mocha colored “I might be Latin, Arab or mixed” look that you see working at almost any mall 5 miles outside of any major city. In other words the race I saw her as is North American.
Yes. Her race to me was North American. Which of course is my personal “racial” construct. No less legitimate (maybe more legitimate?) than the truly racist labels of “white” or “black”.
I think my point was, she could be white, and experiencing the same lifelong heartbreaking struggle of hope and hopelessness Tracy Chapman expressed in "Fast Car," because it's NOT about race.
But so many of the abused and exploited footsoldiers of our economy are exactly the "North Americans" you describe.
I’m a song writer. (Not professionally but in my most egotistically manic states I know my melodies are better than Costello and my lyrics are way better than McCartney’s. But I’m in my 50’s, so I’ll only be discovered & rightfully praised posthumously). I’m telling you this because my next song will rhyme “toothaches” and “earthquakes”. I’ll give you credit if you want. But I’m doing it either way. Ha.
Left unsaid - because you’re not smart enough. A more compelling story would describe what it’s like to be one of the 45 million Americans with an IQ below 85.
I didn’t read this to be about ability, I think that is missing information here. I see it as the culmination of so many things, so many different ways that the protagonist lacked privilege, for lack of a better word. It’s not just one thing, it’s so many things, that it’s hard to put a numerical value on her privilege/ lack of privilege, say, in a corporate workshop.
If the "lottery ticket" is metaphysical, then one's inherent abilities are no less part of the lottery than one's family's wealth, access to education, birthplace, race...
Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.
And all of this miserable human tragedy stems from the very first paragraph: "you chose not to get an abortion". Yes, that was a choice the mother made. It was not an inevitability, it was not something that just happened like the weather, it was her choice. And her daughter and the rest of society will be paying for that choice for decades.
Nah we don't do that here. We don't shame people for the perfectly human and incredibly common situation of getting pregnant under less than ideal circumstances.
If it helps kickstart your Empathy Engine, pretend she was sexually assaulted. The circumstances she lives through afterwards will be identical and you won’t have to go through the effort to invoke her personal morality to justify why her life is so harsh.
But Freddie didn't write it that way. I think there is a reason: then there would have been an identifiable human villain, which would have undermind his point of "capitalism bad".
In its glorious and intentional color-blindness and sexual-morality-blindness, this scenario is an /excellent/ argument for "capitalism bad". "Right to work" was only ever a code for "screw the working poor".
I understand that corrupt union bosses are demons in human skin, and using their power over closed shops to buy entire towns was a major, /major/ problem, but "right to work" swung the pendulum WAY too hard the other way, and it seems sorta stuck right now.
The society Freddie describes is indeed bad, but there are capitalist countries where things like this don't happen this way (Germany is the best example). And I've given my policy prescription for changing it in another top-line comment.
The text is entirely consistent with her having been married to the guy, and him having been reasonably economically and emotionally stable at the time of conception. There's no reason to think she did anything immoral or imprudent.
In that sense, the text is also consistent with her winning ten million dollars from the lottery ticket. And having sex without taking steps to prevent pregnancy (and STDs) is not immoral (IMO), but it is definitely imprudent.
The human tragedy is not that she didn’t have an abortion. I’m as pro-choice as they come and yet I find your assessment extremely misogynistic and offensive. The human tragedy is that she was born poor and female.
I think the point of Freddie's book was the tragedy was two fold: 1. she was born with low ability 2. society doesn't do enough for those with low ability
It didn’t read to me like someone with low academic ability. Especially the line “Perhaps you’ll write that novel.” She sounds trapped in a situation where her academic talents don’t matter one way or the other.
But that's the opposite of the point Freddie's book was trying to make. The great lie is if only she had better parents, if only she had better schools, if only....then she wouldn't be poor. It's a great lie because millions of American have very limited ability. We need to deal with that reality and not delude ourselves into thinking anyone can be successful if only we make some tweaks to the system.
In this case, we don’t know why she never went to college. It could have been poor academic ability (like in the book) or some other reason. Without knowing that backstory it’s hard to say how her situation relates to The Cult of Smart. But once she gets pregnant, it no longer matters.
I am responding to the main character’s situation which is not to discount the father’s suffering/ lack of privilege nor anyone else who suffers in this world. Having sole or main responsibility of a child (a common occurrence for female human beings) adds a really, really big weight for poor women.
I know you've reported some back and forth on how much should be subscribers-only, but would you consider making this one public? I just forwarded it to my wife (hope that's OK).
As compact a breakdown of...the working class breakdown that I've read; I hope it's read widely.
"You never went to college. You made $9.68 an hour at a big-box store as a cashier, but you left the job. Your boss never came out and said that he was cutting your hours and messing with your schedule because you got pregnant, but you were, and he did. Your friend tells you that you can pursue legal action. You're scared so you don’t."
As a plaintiff-side employment attorney, this hit especially hard. Not because she was too scared to take action, but because her fear of taking action is justified by how courts treat the burden of proof applicable to pregnancy discrimination claims.
Jesus, way to fuck up my Friday morning. I’m trying to keep from crying in front of my coworkers at a low-wage construction job in the basement of an NYCHA building. I’d never hear the end of it.
Staying afloat isn’t easy right now, and it’s nice to see someone acknowledge the burden that coronavirus measures have placed on the poor across the country. The online metropolitans love to demonize those who opposed lockdowns, but often fail to realize that we can’t all work from home, many people aren’t qualified for unemployment, and some states don’t provide a livable rate without the federal government. So, were a lot of those protesters right-wing nut jobs? Probably, but they were right wing nut jobs rightly convinced that they were about to lose everything everything.
“Boo-hoo Karen can’t get her haircut!” became the mocking cry of the cultured know-it-all, and I imagine this character’s eventual occupation isn’t coincidental to that.
Of course the correct response was lockdowns AND massive government support to replace lost wages, which is what happened in Germany. And is what could have happened in the US if the candidates favored by those online metropolitans had won more Congressional elections.
Why does the empathy of "the cultured know-it-all" matter to you? You are right that "some states don’t provide a livable rate without the federal government". Those would be (mostly) red states. I would think that you would care more about getting those states to provide a livable unemployment than you would care about empathy from people you don't much like.
What are you on about? Are you just in this thread to sneer at poor people whose politics you claim to know and dislike?
I have no particular worry about your capacity (or lack thereof) for empathy, but you responded to my comment with an obvious attempt to deny empathy. You also decided I don’t like unemployment benefits or something? Do you think my post was an endorsement of right-wing politics?
Anyway, don’t you have WFH to do or are Fridays light days?
How was I denying empathy? I was pointing out that other countries handled the covid crisis in a way that provided much better support for working people who needed it. I think the US should have done the same. I think people like me should be paying vastly more in taxes to support such programs. I work to elect candidates who will tax me more and provide more govenment services to people who need it. If that makes me not emphathetic, so be it.
And other than that, I'm not going to respond to your personal insult.
I think you're overweighting the minority of people who weren't eligible for unemployment (what groups are you thinking ok?) and underweighting how much that extra $600/week helped the lowest paid laid off workers to dig themselves out for the first time in a long time.
I think you’re misremembering how the early days of the pandemic occurred. There was massive uncertainty. The Federal Government didn’t immediately shell out cash to everyone affected. If I remember correctly it took a couple weeks just for the necessary legislation to be passed, not to mention the time it took to implement it nationwide. State unemployment agencies struggled to keep up with claims, and in some cases people weren’t approved for months. Also, there are restrictions to receiving unemployment that disqualify “many people” (lol not a quantifiable statement but ok if you take issue with that). Anyone who is self-employed, works under the table, hasn’t lived somewhere long enough to make the requisite amount of money, freelancers, etc.
I’m not saying these people didn’t end up getting help or that we shouldn’t have locked down, but the immediate effects were a true nightmare scenario. If you don’t remember that you probably didn’t bear the brunt of this pandemic.
People don’t necessarily protest for high-minded ideals like liberty. They protest because something is going to hurt them or the people they care about and use high-minded ideals for later, more academic, justification.
What's really beautiful about this piece is what it doesn't say, and how each of us reads something different into those intentional gaps, and what we read into those gaps says about us. For example, a lot of people will read a racial into this. Personally, I visualized the woman as white. Poverty knows no race. My own biases showed up when I assumed the conception was the result of premarital sex, and it was only on a reread that I realized the piece was intentionally silent on that front as well.
What this woman needed, more than anything else, was unions. Can I have a leftist party that cares about the poor's employment prospects and stability, rather than the melanin levels in their skin? That'd be awesome.
That was my initial hot take too (although I phrased it more along the lines of "A major societal pressure to avoid even the slightest possibility of conception outside of a stable marriage was never patriarchal oppression, but just basic sanity and prudence"") but on a reread, there is no evidence in the actual text that she did anything immoral or imprudent. The text is entirely consistent with her being married to the guy and him having been reasonably economically and emotionally stable at the time of conception. As I said, the beauty of the text is what it doesn't say, and what it reveals about us when we read our assumptions into those intentional gaps.
Fucking is not immoral (in my view), but it is most certainly imprudent if you don't take steps to prevent pregnancy and STDs.
And I disagree that the text is "consistent with her being married to the guy and him having been reasonably economically and emotionally stable at the time of conception". At that level, it's also consistent to say that all her problems were solved when the lottery ticket got her ten million dollars. Both are about equally likely IMO.
Getting effective birth control in the US can be surprisingly difficult. Start with the fact that it requires a prescription, and go on to the fact that in rural and more conservative areas, Planned Parenthood may not be an option and the majority of health care providers may be run under the auspices of the Catholic Church.
Birth control pills aren't as effective as longer lasting devices like IUDs and implants, as many women (including my daughter-in-law) can attest, but these may not be readily available where many women live, not to mention the higher cost, which many women can't afford.
Well there he goes again, with his "aren't things awful" take, and NO solutions offered that are in any way practical or achievable.
The protagonist's life is much better in blue states than in red states. In blue states Medicaid is much more available, for example.
So here's a reasonable (I claim) political strategy: let's try to turn more red states blue.
Now let's think about how to do that. In practice, "blue" means more Democrats in the state legislature than Republicans, and a Democrat governor. Electable Democrats in currently red states are going to be pretty centrist: AOC has no chance in Arkansas, but Bill Clinton did, Mike Beebe did.
So if you want to help as many of these story protagonists as possible, get off your butts and elect more centrist Democrats in red states.
And if Freddie or anybody else has a better strategy: let's hear it.
I wish you would take this in the spirit in which it is offered. It's not a policy paper. It's something I felt moved to write that's quieter and more narrative.
And: c'mon man. You write endless indictments of capitalism. You write about how you want politics in your music. How I am supposed to read this (knowing you wrote it) and NOT think of it in terms of politics? It's like not thinking of the elephant.
I don't think they're pointless, and I have often ('mistakenly', or so I now think) tried to think (out loud) about "action items", so I'm extremely sympathetic!
We'd all like to improve the systems which failed and fail people in such circumstances. But if you find yourself believing you know the way to 'solve the problem' that is someone else's life...that may be something deserving of some thought.
I don't think it's necessarily about "believing you know the way to 'solve the problem' that is someone else's life" – some of us just naturally want to 'solve' anything that looks like a 'problem'.
Personally, I've had to learn to discern whether someone is asking for help versus 'venting' – and I often explicitly ask too now. For myself, and I think people broadly similar, it's a particularly frustrating form of 'emotional support' to be the target of repeated, let alone frequent, venting from someone that doesn't seem interested in, or maybe incapable, of taking concrete action to solve their problems.
And none of the above _arguably_ applies to the person to which you're replying as Freddie did explicitly write (in a comment on this post) "interpret it how you naturally feel".
Wow, Freddie. Just wow. Thank you. (And thanks for not inventing a race or a location for her.)
I thought of her as white until someone here mentioned the issue. Perhaps this is because I live in a rural area with hardly anyone who is not white, but with a great deal of poverty.
Please let this be shared. It’s the white (or not, who cares?) working class version of “Fast Car.”
Funny, as I read it I didn’t see the woman and her daughter as white or black. I saw her as that new, tattooed, mocha colored “I might be Latin, Arab or mixed” look that you see working at almost any mall 5 miles outside of any major city. In other words the race I saw her as is North American.
Yes. Her race to me was North American. Which of course is my personal “racial” construct. No less legitimate (maybe more legitimate?) than the truly racist labels of “white” or “black”.
Right.
I think my point was, she could be white, and experiencing the same lifelong heartbreaking struggle of hope and hopelessness Tracy Chapman expressed in "Fast Car," because it's NOT about race.
But so many of the abused and exploited footsoldiers of our economy are exactly the "North Americans" you describe.
Last paragraph got me Freddie. Well done.
I’m a song writer. (Not professionally but in my most egotistically manic states I know my melodies are better than Costello and my lyrics are way better than McCartney’s. But I’m in my 50’s, so I’ll only be discovered & rightfully praised posthumously). I’m telling you this because my next song will rhyme “toothaches” and “earthquakes”. I’ll give you credit if you want. But I’m doing it either way. Ha.
“You never went to college.”
Left unsaid - because you’re not smart enough. A more compelling story would describe what it’s like to be one of the 45 million Americans with an IQ below 85.
It's funny, I thought at first that the title indicated the story would be more in that direction. Still a devastating story.
Yeh - a lottery ticket implies that everyone has an equal chance. But with ability not evenly distributed the chances are very much not equal.
I didn’t read this to be about ability, I think that is missing information here. I see it as the culmination of so many things, so many different ways that the protagonist lacked privilege, for lack of a better word. It’s not just one thing, it’s so many things, that it’s hard to put a numerical value on her privilege/ lack of privilege, say, in a corporate workshop.
"I didn’t read this to be about ability,"
Available at fine booksellers everywhere:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250224491
You know that it's possible for an author to write about more than one topic, right?
There's no reason to conclude that the woman in the story has an IQ below 85. Plenty of average-intelligence and even smart people are poor.
"Plenty of average-intelligence and even smart people are poor."
Care to take a guess at the percentages for each group?
If the "lottery ticket" is metaphysical, then one's inherent abilities are no less part of the lottery than one's family's wealth, access to education, birthplace, race...
Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.
And all of this miserable human tragedy stems from the very first paragraph: "you chose not to get an abortion". Yes, that was a choice the mother made. It was not an inevitability, it was not something that just happened like the weather, it was her choice. And her daughter and the rest of society will be paying for that choice for decades.
well that's bleak
Or get birth control before fucking the worthless dude. Or, you know, just not fuck.
Nah we don't do that here. We don't shame people for the perfectly human and incredibly common situation of getting pregnant under less than ideal circumstances.
That said, implantable birth control and indeed all birth control should be free and easy to obtain.
If it helps kickstart your Empathy Engine, pretend she was sexually assaulted. The circumstances she lives through afterwards will be identical and you won’t have to go through the effort to invoke her personal morality to justify why her life is so harsh.
But Freddie didn't write it that way. I think there is a reason: then there would have been an identifiable human villain, which would have undermind his point of "capitalism bad".
In its glorious and intentional color-blindness and sexual-morality-blindness, this scenario is an /excellent/ argument for "capitalism bad". "Right to work" was only ever a code for "screw the working poor".
I understand that corrupt union bosses are demons in human skin, and using their power over closed shops to buy entire towns was a major, /major/ problem, but "right to work" swung the pendulum WAY too hard the other way, and it seems sorta stuck right now.
The society Freddie describes is indeed bad, but there are capitalist countries where things like this don't happen this way (Germany is the best example). And I've given my policy prescription for changing it in another top-line comment.
The text is entirely consistent with her having been married to the guy, and him having been reasonably economically and emotionally stable at the time of conception. There's no reason to think she did anything immoral or imprudent.
In that sense, the text is also consistent with her winning ten million dollars from the lottery ticket. And having sex without taking steps to prevent pregnancy (and STDs) is not immoral (IMO), but it is definitely imprudent.
Maybe she wanted to have a baby, just like she was a woman or something. Imagine. For this reason probably Alex doesn't get it.
Then she should be prepared to care for the baby. Pretty clear that she wasn't.
The human tragedy is not that she didn’t have an abortion. I’m as pro-choice as they come and yet I find your assessment extremely misogynistic and offensive. The human tragedy is that she was born poor and female.
I think the point of Freddie's book was the tragedy was two fold: 1. she was born with low ability 2. society doesn't do enough for those with low ability
Was not thinking in terms of the unequal endowments of talent when I wrote this but it's certainly a legitimate reading.
"He lost his job at a landscaping company for cursing out his boss."
And impulse control is highly heritable. Another burden in addition to low academic ability.
In a just world, occasional episodes of non-violent low impulse control should not be an economic death sentence.
In a _better_ world, even frequent violence wouldn't be _any_ kind of death sentence – may we ever be so rich to achieve that!
It didn’t read to me like someone with low academic ability. Especially the line “Perhaps you’ll write that novel.” She sounds trapped in a situation where her academic talents don’t matter one way or the other.
But that's the opposite of the point Freddie's book was trying to make. The great lie is if only she had better parents, if only she had better schools, if only....then she wouldn't be poor. It's a great lie because millions of American have very limited ability. We need to deal with that reality and not delude ourselves into thinking anyone can be successful if only we make some tweaks to the system.
In this case, we don’t know why she never went to college. It could have been poor academic ability (like in the book) or some other reason. Without knowing that backstory it’s hard to say how her situation relates to The Cult of Smart. But once she gets pregnant, it no longer matters.
" Without knowing that backstory it’s hard to say how her situation relates to The Cult of Smart. "
Other than having the same author and all :-)
The tragedy is that she was born poor and female? I mean...the father is a manual laborer who ends up a corpse under the freeway.
The tragedy of the protagonist is that she was born poor and female. Yes, the father’s life was tragic too, despite walking away from his child.
Being born poor and male didn't do the father much good.
I am responding to the main character’s situation which is not to discount the father’s suffering/ lack of privilege nor anyone else who suffers in this world. Having sole or main responsibility of a child (a common occurrence for female human beings) adds a really, really big weight for poor women.
If only you could have chosen to have some empathy even for a fictional character rather than "winning" the sociopath lottery.
“You will abort your child whether you want to or not- children are a luxury item reserved for the well to do.”
Yes, very pro choice.
Echoes of "The Jungle"
Potent stuff.
I know you've reported some back and forth on how much should be subscribers-only, but would you consider making this one public? I just forwarded it to my wife (hope that's OK).
As compact a breakdown of...the working class breakdown that I've read; I hope it's read widely.
Copy and paste it to whomever you'd like.
"You never went to college. You made $9.68 an hour at a big-box store as a cashier, but you left the job. Your boss never came out and said that he was cutting your hours and messing with your schedule because you got pregnant, but you were, and he did. Your friend tells you that you can pursue legal action. You're scared so you don’t."
As a plaintiff-side employment attorney, this hit especially hard. Not because she was too scared to take action, but because her fear of taking action is justified by how courts treat the burden of proof applicable to pregnancy discrimination claims.
Jesus, that's bleak and moving.
I didn't need more motivation to encourage violent revolution, but thanks just the same, Freddie
Oh yes, violent revolution will make everyone's life so much better, just as happened in ... where, exactly?
"We must do something. Violent revolution is something. Therefore..."
Beautiful. Reminds me a bit of this song:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3pdZIYH-s4
Thanks for that. This one came to mind for me:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AetBG8e-ECs
Jesus, way to fuck up my Friday morning. I’m trying to keep from crying in front of my coworkers at a low-wage construction job in the basement of an NYCHA building. I’d never hear the end of it.
Staying afloat isn’t easy right now, and it’s nice to see someone acknowledge the burden that coronavirus measures have placed on the poor across the country. The online metropolitans love to demonize those who opposed lockdowns, but often fail to realize that we can’t all work from home, many people aren’t qualified for unemployment, and some states don’t provide a livable rate without the federal government. So, were a lot of those protesters right-wing nut jobs? Probably, but they were right wing nut jobs rightly convinced that they were about to lose everything everything.
“Boo-hoo Karen can’t get her haircut!” became the mocking cry of the cultured know-it-all, and I imagine this character’s eventual occupation isn’t coincidental to that.
Of course the correct response was lockdowns AND massive government support to replace lost wages, which is what happened in Germany. And is what could have happened in the US if the candidates favored by those online metropolitans had won more Congressional elections.
Sure. What does that have to do with empathy?
Why does the empathy of "the cultured know-it-all" matter to you? You are right that "some states don’t provide a livable rate without the federal government". Those would be (mostly) red states. I would think that you would care more about getting those states to provide a livable unemployment than you would care about empathy from people you don't much like.
What are you on about? Are you just in this thread to sneer at poor people whose politics you claim to know and dislike?
I have no particular worry about your capacity (or lack thereof) for empathy, but you responded to my comment with an obvious attempt to deny empathy. You also decided I don’t like unemployment benefits or something? Do you think my post was an endorsement of right-wing politics?
Anyway, don’t you have WFH to do or are Fridays light days?
How was I denying empathy? I was pointing out that other countries handled the covid crisis in a way that provided much better support for working people who needed it. I think the US should have done the same. I think people like me should be paying vastly more in taxes to support such programs. I work to elect candidates who will tax me more and provide more govenment services to people who need it. If that makes me not emphathetic, so be it.
And other than that, I'm not going to respond to your personal insult.
“It’s her fault for not voting blue.”
“It’s her fault for having a child.”
That’s what you sound like. Get a grip and stop lording yourself over those less fortunate than you.
I think you're overweighting the minority of people who weren't eligible for unemployment (what groups are you thinking ok?) and underweighting how much that extra $600/week helped the lowest paid laid off workers to dig themselves out for the first time in a long time.
I think you’re misremembering how the early days of the pandemic occurred. There was massive uncertainty. The Federal Government didn’t immediately shell out cash to everyone affected. If I remember correctly it took a couple weeks just for the necessary legislation to be passed, not to mention the time it took to implement it nationwide. State unemployment agencies struggled to keep up with claims, and in some cases people weren’t approved for months. Also, there are restrictions to receiving unemployment that disqualify “many people” (lol not a quantifiable statement but ok if you take issue with that). Anyone who is self-employed, works under the table, hasn’t lived somewhere long enough to make the requisite amount of money, freelancers, etc.
I’m not saying these people didn’t end up getting help or that we shouldn’t have locked down, but the immediate effects were a true nightmare scenario. If you don’t remember that you probably didn’t bear the brunt of this pandemic.
People don’t necessarily protest for high-minded ideals like liberty. They protest because something is going to hurt them or the people they care about and use high-minded ideals for later, more academic, justification.
What's really beautiful about this piece is what it doesn't say, and how each of us reads something different into those intentional gaps, and what we read into those gaps says about us. For example, a lot of people will read a racial into this. Personally, I visualized the woman as white. Poverty knows no race. My own biases showed up when I assumed the conception was the result of premarital sex, and it was only on a reread that I realized the piece was intentionally silent on that front as well.
What this woman needed, more than anything else, was unions. Can I have a leftist party that cares about the poor's employment prospects and stability, rather than the melanin levels in their skin? That'd be awesome.
What this woman needed, more than anything else, was enough sense to get birth control before fucking some dude with no prospects.
That was my initial hot take too (although I phrased it more along the lines of "A major societal pressure to avoid even the slightest possibility of conception outside of a stable marriage was never patriarchal oppression, but just basic sanity and prudence"") but on a reread, there is no evidence in the actual text that she did anything immoral or imprudent. The text is entirely consistent with her being married to the guy and him having been reasonably economically and emotionally stable at the time of conception. As I said, the beauty of the text is what it doesn't say, and what it reveals about us when we read our assumptions into those intentional gaps.
Fucking is not immoral (in my view), but it is most certainly imprudent if you don't take steps to prevent pregnancy and STDs.
And I disagree that the text is "consistent with her being married to the guy and him having been reasonably economically and emotionally stable at the time of conception". At that level, it's also consistent to say that all her problems were solved when the lottery ticket got her ten million dollars. Both are about equally likely IMO.
"His condom broke." Fixed the problem for you.
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/teens/ask-experts/how-often-do-condoms-break
As an experienced user, yes. But your original comment was about "her" birth control decisions. Do I need to be pedantic to point out "his" options?
Getting effective birth control in the US can be surprisingly difficult. Start with the fact that it requires a prescription, and go on to the fact that in rural and more conservative areas, Planned Parenthood may not be an option and the majority of health care providers may be run under the auspices of the Catholic Church.
Birth control pills aren't as effective as longer lasting devices like IUDs and implants, as many women (including my daughter-in-law) can attest, but these may not be readily available where many women live, not to mention the higher cost, which many women can't afford.
I'm not a Time magazine reader but this is actually a pretty good article on the barriers women face when choosing birth control. https://time.com/6176062/future-birth-control-access-long-lasting-contraceptives/
I wrote this to be open to interpretation, so interpret it how you naturally feel.
<3
Well there he goes again, with his "aren't things awful" take, and NO solutions offered that are in any way practical or achievable.
The protagonist's life is much better in blue states than in red states. In blue states Medicaid is much more available, for example.
So here's a reasonable (I claim) political strategy: let's try to turn more red states blue.
Now let's think about how to do that. In practice, "blue" means more Democrats in the state legislature than Republicans, and a Democrat governor. Electable Democrats in currently red states are going to be pretty centrist: AOC has no chance in Arkansas, but Bill Clinton did, Mike Beebe did.
So if you want to help as many of these story protagonists as possible, get off your butts and elect more centrist Democrats in red states.
And if Freddie or anybody else has a better strategy: let's hear it.
I wish you would take this in the spirit in which it is offered. It's not a policy paper. It's something I felt moved to write that's quieter and more narrative.
"interpret it how you naturally feel", you said. That's exactly what I did. When I hear abot a devastating problem, I want to try to solve it.
And: c'mon man. You write endless indictments of capitalism. You write about how you want politics in your music. How I am supposed to read this (knowing you wrote it) and NOT think of it in terms of politics? It's like not thinking of the elephant.
I get that. I get that.
I think the reasonable and charitable interpretation of his criticism about your comment is mainly about the first and last sentences.
Tho "interpret it how you naturally feel" _does_ reasonably cover even that.
I just don't see the point of tear jerkers without action items. It's a character flaw of mine.
I don't think they're pointless, and I have often ('mistakenly', or so I now think) tried to think (out loud) about "action items", so I'm extremely sympathetic!
We'd all like to improve the systems which failed and fail people in such circumstances. But if you find yourself believing you know the way to 'solve the problem' that is someone else's life...that may be something deserving of some thought.
If the person is unhappy, and wishes for other things, that is by definition a problem, no?
I don't think it's necessarily about "believing you know the way to 'solve the problem' that is someone else's life" – some of us just naturally want to 'solve' anything that looks like a 'problem'.
Personally, I've had to learn to discern whether someone is asking for help versus 'venting' – and I often explicitly ask too now. For myself, and I think people broadly similar, it's a particularly frustrating form of 'emotional support' to be the target of repeated, let alone frequent, venting from someone that doesn't seem interested in, or maybe incapable, of taking concrete action to solve their problems.
And none of the above _arguably_ applies to the person to which you're replying as Freddie did explicitly write (in a comment on this post) "interpret it how you naturally feel".
In my blue state, this woman well might have ended up homeless, as so many do, owing to the astronomical cost of having a roof over one’s head.