Thursday, June 28, 2018

ANS -- When to run

This is a piece about when to run from the US before it turns into a closed-border fascist dictatorship.  I'm including the comments because it's an interesting, if scary, conversation.  
--Kim


My favorite chapter in The Handmaid's Tale comes fairly late in the book. Offred has been confined to her room with nothing to do but think, and uses the time to review the whole rise of Gilead and ask herself: when SHOULD she have insisted that they flee the country? How SHOULD she (and more importantly, her husband, who kept talking her out of it) have known when it was going to be too late? Because "it's just a phase" seemed plausible and "there's always another election" did too and "these things pass" and "we still have rule of law in this country" -- until the borders were forcibly closed and the army posted at the escape routes and then it was too late.

(In the book, the point where I would have run like I was trying to outrun an explosion would have been when all women's bank accounts were seized and transferred to their male guardians; I am deeply angry at the character of her husband for calming her down after that, for insisting that don't worry, the courts will surely overturn it or some such thing.)

With Donald Trump getting a 5th solid seat on the Supreme Court no later than, say, October, I'm seeing people ask, "Is it time? Is it going to be time, soon?" On that subject, I'm shifting my stance from "no" to "not yet, probably not soon, but maybe soon."

Because here's what's on my mind, here's how it ends if it does end. John Roberts writes a calm-sounding decision that claims to uphold Roe v Wade but that has the effect of allowing any state that wants to to criminalize abortion in practice -- say, an 8 week waiting period plus a 20 week ban, plus impossible to meet restrictions on any doctor, clinic, or pharmacist.

The Guttmacher Institute says that 18 states have already passed laws that would entirely or almost entirely ban abortion the next day after Roe is struck down. 8 states have taken the opposite stance, passing laws explicitly protecting abortion even if Roe is struck down. So it is obviously true that in a post-Roe America we will have legal-abortion states and illegal-abortion states.

If a pregnant woman from Mississippi travels to New York, will she be stopped at the airport (or train station or bus terminal or highway checkpoint) and her pregnancy status checked before and after the trip? If a woman from Missouri travels to Maine to get and pick up a prescription for mifepristone, and Missouri presses murder charges against the pharmacist, will Maine extradite? If a woman from Colorado woman travels to California for a surgical abortion and Colorado presses murder charges against the surgeon, will California extradite?

Right now, my pack-your-bags-in-case line is "the minute any state tries to extradite a resident of a legal-abortion state," whether they succeed or not. My run-like-everything's-on-fire line, right now, is the minute the federal government steps in on either side of that dispute.

Because it has not escaped my attention that the proximate cause of the Civil War, the final trigger that pushed South Carolina to secede, was widespread refusal of law enforcement officials in anti-slavery states to extradite escaped slaves even after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act made such lack of cooperation illegal -- it was, at its heart, a desperate attempt to close the border so that South Carolinians (and other Confederate states') citizens couldn't flee to states where their rights would be protected.

And I have less than perfect confidence that a Second American Civil War wouldn't go nuclear. So if we even start down a path where abortion is legal in some states and illegal in others and where states are threatening each other over this, you should already be prepared to move yourself and your family somewhere out of the reach of the war that might be coming.

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David Attila Szucs
David Attila Szucs or stand and help others flee till you are caught or die.
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Brad Hicks
Brad Hicks Or stay and White Rose it until they execute you, but I absolutely don't recommend that option to anybody with dependents.
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David Attila Szucs
David Attila Szucs it is what it is. always tried to be a hero. nows my big gig.
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Brad Hicks
Brad Hicks You already did your big gig, and have the service dog to show for it. Concentrate on saving your dependents, if it comes to that. Let somebody who doesn't have dependents be the hero.
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David Attila Szucs
David Attila Szucs never enough, owe too much.
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Kim Cooper
Kim Cooper I never thought about being a hero, but since we live ten or twelve miles from Canada, if someone makes an underground railroad.... but we don't have a basement or anything.... (no dependents. )
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Kim Cooper
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Hal Bierman
Hal Bierman If I recall, Handmaids Tale did not do well by the Jews. We were expelled but never reached our safe haven.
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Brad Hicks
Brad Hicks And one of the things I'm annoyed with HBO over was changing the fact that in the book, black people were rounded up en masse and forced to hand-excavate toxic waste sites until they died.

I don't know if a full-Gilead scenario is plausible. (Ask me a
gain if Trump nominates Sessions to the court or if Trump gets replaced by Pence.) But I know that I've gotten harder and harder to panic as I've gotten older, and Kennedy's retirement has raised my level, not to the actual panic level, but to the point where I can imagine panicking soon-ish.
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Kim Cooper
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Elizabeth Osborne Fischer
Elizabeth Osborne Fischer As a woman who has had two abortions, I have had these what-ifs going through my head for years. I wish I could say you are wrong. You aren't.
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Rowan Moonstone
Rowan Moonstone Some of us have no where to run TO and no $$ to make it happen.
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Brad Hicks
Brad Hicks If you have dependents, and my "run! now!" line gets crossed, my advice to you will be to do what Salvadoran parents are doing when their children are facing conscription into MS-13: if all you can do is start walking towards the border, start walking. The alternative is to do nothing and LET your dependents die, and if they die, die knowing you didn't try the last thing that might have saved them.
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Rowan Moonstone
Rowan Moonstone Fortunately, I have no dependents to worry about.
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Kim Cooper
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Robert Mathiesen
Robert Mathiesen I've started to wonder whether any other country would actually be willing to let large numbers of American citizens immigrate there. Which countries do you think might be willing to let lots of us in? 

Myself, I can't think of a single such country at the moment, apart from the obvious exception of Israel as a refuge for American Jews--and they are a relatively small fraction of all Americans.
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Brad Hicks
Brad Hicks If open warfare breaks out in the US, I strongly suspect that the entire British Commonwealth and most of the EU will accept US refugees.
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Brad Hicks
Brad Hicks I'm also not optimistic that LARGE numbers of us will flee in time, if it comes to that. If a Syrian-style civil war breaks out in the US, the humanitarian disaster will be unimaginable.
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Robert Mathiesen
Robert Mathiesen I'm skeptical. There's a significant amount of anti-American sentiment in Europe these days, and it would be politically risky for any European politician to welcome a flood of refugees from the US. -- But yes, if it's only a trickle who immigrate, the earlier ones might be allowed to immigrate.
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Brad Hicks
Brad Hicks Consider also the Jews who bought and escaped aboard the MV St. Louis. No country was willing to take them in, as you fear would happen to you. But in the process, SOME of them survived -- more than would have survived if they hadn't tried.
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Robert Mathiesen
Robert Mathiesen By all means, try! All I am really claiming is that one should not be too surprised if one is turned away. In such a case, do what you can for yourself and your children anyway.
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Steve Martin
Steve Martin If only there was a large un-American country just to the north...
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JoEllen Potchen-Webb
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Kim Cooper
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Mari Blair
Mari Blair so glad I'm barren
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Brad Hicks
Brad Hicks Damned glad I don't have kids in today's world, myself.
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Kim Cooper
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JoEllen Potchen-Webb
JoEllen Potchen-Webb I have kids. Hundreds of them. Now that I'm retired, even more than that. 
Need to continue to fight for the children of my neighbors, because, in the end, they are all of our kids.
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Dawn O'Leary
Dawn O'Leary As soon as the kids graduate high school, I am shipping them to the west coast. When the second one graduates, we are following. Too close to the South to feel safe anymore
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Brad Hicks
Brad Hicks I'll miss you, but you're not wrong.
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Kim Cooper
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Christie Dudley
Christie Dudley The only scenario I see possibly leading to extradition on a now-existing (minus Roe v. Wade) doctrine of Constitutional Law is if a pharmacist prescribes pills and someone carries those pills to another state to enable a woman to have an abortion. That far removed, it would be likely that whoever carried them to the state where abortion is not legal would be the end of the line for criminal liability.

We would have to go a very long way before state sovereignty got away from us like that. Acts that are performed wholly within another state are held to account by that state, as per the 5th Amendment. The right to travel has been considered fundamental in 14th Amendment jurisprudence. Also Full Faith and Credit would have to go away, too, and that could be the only grounds such extradition could happen. Without that, we would have a very, very shaky union of states.

It seems very odd that I feel the earth is a lot more solid under my feet now that I am here in earthquake country. But here I have a lot of confidence that I wouldn't need to flee extended reactionary idiocy since the whole damn state would be with me.
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Elizabeth Osborne Fischer
Elizabeth Osborne Fischer Don't bet on it. There are people that would makw receiving an abortion a criminal murder charge and not blink twice.
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Brad Hicks
Brad Hicks Here's what concerns me about your argument: the idea that states should extradite suspected murderers is uncontroversial. If someone from Missouri were to murder someone from California, it would be uncontroversial for California to ask Missouri local police to arrest the guy and ship him to California to stand trial. But none of those precedents ever applied to a situation where two states had conflicting definitions of "murder."
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Lisa Hull
Lisa Hull Elizabeth Osborne Fischer also, the DEA is a thing. We already have a militarized federal agency dedicated to controlling the movements of pharmaceuticals
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Kim Cooper
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Kip Canterbury
Kip Canterbury What I fear and see as most likely is America dissolving even further into parochialism not even as coherent as Red State vs. Blue but smaller communities drawing together against what they see as "The Other / The Outsider" that being people who are different from them be it because of Skin Color, National Origin, Religion or Political Views. - More Gated Communities in suburbia and Barricaded neighborhoods in cities with check points with self styled Citizen Police manning them and small towns blocking access to them to keep their communities "Pure" 
- Then there are the Militias, Patriots, 3%ers, Citizens Guards, Sovereign Citizens, Oath Keepers etc. etc. all of whom have a lot of guns and don't really like each other all that much and then the other Rural and Urban living people who have guns (not a racial statement but, a general fact) 
- Once they start shooting at each other it will (ironically) give the reason that .... This Happens ...
Trump and Company using "National Security" as a reason - as they have already realized that those are "Magic Words" that they can use to get what they want. - Declare Martial Law and suspend Elections along with most of the Constitution giving Trump his wish to be "El Presidente for Life" and a True Minority Group takes control of the Country .....
- Then things get REAL interesting as we see how much of the Military and Law Enforcement go along with it or turn on them.
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Elizabeth Osborne Fischer
Elizabeth Osborne Fischer You aren't the only one worried about martial law and cancelled elections. It wouldn't even take your scenario either... they are already villianizing Maxine Waters, and you know the "illegal voters" myth will be trotted out.
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Kim Cooper
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Jennifer Seggev
Jennifer Seggev I actually discussed worst case plans with my ex husband a year ago. I have a 7 year old daughter, and my heart would break to send her with him. But if it comes down to it, he needs to take her and leave the country and I'll pay for the plane tickets. Because he carries the ability to claim EU citizenship.
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Kim Cooper
Kim Cooper Why wouldn't you go with them?
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