We’re all familiar with the fable of the boy who cried wolf. How charged with guarding the flock at night he falsely twice cried out alarm of the wolf, turned out the adults and laughed at them then on the third alarm when the wolf has actually appeared no one came and, the way it was told to me, he was eaten by the wolf. A cautionary tale against telling lies for when you will need to be believed you won’t be.
But what happened the day after the wolf?
No doubt with the boy killed and the flock in danger the adult sprang into action, formed hunting parties, beat the wood and either drove off or killed the wolf.
It is the follow up that interests me as next year it appears more than likely that our 6 person majority court will strike down Roe v Wade and take back a right from Americans. For years, literally for decades, we have heard the alarms that this was the goal of the right. The cry went up in every campaign that this danger was approaching and following the campaigns the ruling wasn’t overturned. Now those who raised these warnings were not the boy who cried wolf for they were not lying, they saw clearly the looming threat, but the length of time required for the right to gain the power to achieve their goals dulled the alarm and reduced the warning to background radiation of our nuclear war politics. But now it appears the boy will be eaten and what will the response be?
I have heard voices on the right dismissing any political blowback as alarmism. They point to exits polls and how few people voted on the abortion issue alone, but this may very well be a poor extrapolation. There is a very real difference between a hypothetical event, be warned that a danger may exist, and a real event that crashes into the political landscape like an asteroid. Nearly three generations of people have lived with the accepted knowledge that this right existed, its sudden extinction may very well be a shocking, traumatic, and mobilizing event just months before a national election.
Maybe.
We have not been in the situation before. Until this case the progress has been expanding rights of the individual not eliminating them and the past gives us very little upon which to see the future.
