fuckin unfuckinborn child???

            I’ve been offline since the third so, after we leave the park heading back to Atlanta, I decide to take a break at a rest stop that has an information center as I’m very curious why all the u.s.ofa. flags are flying half-mast.

            The two older white womyn solemnly tell me what happened in El Paso and in Dayton. They don’t tell me most of those murdered in El Paso are brown people nor that six of the nine murdered in Ohio appear to be Black. Nor that the shooter is a white male.

            “A white male veteran?” I inquire.

            They both helplessly shrug their shoulders in unison, and the three of us exchange deep, sad helpless looks.

            I bring this sadness with me as I proceed to return outside to my vehicle when I very soft-spoken, self-effacing white male, clean shaven head, finely dressed, sweet smile – everything about him screaming “I’m safe, I care about you, I can take care of you – slowly approaches me, leans his tall slim frame over a few feet away and softly asks if that is my truck parked down the lot.

            I match his broad smile and claim ownership of my truck.

         He nods approvingly, holding out his hand, as he says “You have no message about the ‘innocent unborn’.

            Perhaps if he hadn’t framed his question with ‘innocent’ maybe a wave of fury would not have surges thru me and I want to shout the names of the born people who were murdered in El Paso and Dayton, in Iraq and Yemen, in the rain forest and the oil fields. Perhaps if he had seen my anguish, if he had acknowledged the most recent mass murders, the senseless deaths of so many, I could have responded from my normal, calm, reasonable self.

            I thank the goddesses I had hesitated taking his oh so friendly controlling hand as I could not trust myself to not hurt him. I wanted to smash his face, break him in many pieces as he tells me he’s a doctor – of course he is – and I see all the most vulnerable desperate womyn and girls approaching him, believing him, counting on him for their healthcare not imagining how truncated his caring and thus their health care will be.

            Instead of flattening him onto the roadway, I furiously yell at the top of my lungs: “I don’t have time or the ability to deal with womyn-hating assholes like you.”

          He gets that hang-dog, lame doe-eyed how-could-u-be-so-mean-to-innocent-little-me look and raises his voice to challenge me about protecting the “unborn child.”

         As I stride through the now silent travelers parting on the sidewalk to let me pass, I shout more names at him and end up calling him the biggest idiot if he as a medical professional doesn’t know the fuckin difference between a clump of cells and a child.

            Well, the fury subsides with my grandson perched in his passenger seat, looking at me and wondering what happened. Do I tell him about the mass murders? Do I tell him about the oppression of womyn? He already knows what flags flying half-mast means so I tell him that yet another white man has shot some people in Texas and Ohio. He only wants to know if we’re going through those states and I’m glad we’re not.

            I can’t tell him, after we’ve spent almost two weeks on the road and about a week of that journey in one of the whitest states in the union, that white men with guns are willing to murder are in every state.