My great grandmother Julianna died in 1935 aborting herself with a coat hanger in Southern Idaho. She was born in 1915 and died in 1935. Twenty years old. I’m a fifth-generation Idahoan, my family moved to Idaho during the great Mormon exodus of Illinois.
They were extremely impoverished. It was the Great Depression and in one of her letters, she writes about not even having the luxury of bone broth They were barely able to take care of their two children and she writes that it was better to save two children than let three starve. In her letters, she describes her guilt and the emotional pain she endured watching her two children be hungry. One of those children was my grandmother. She describes her concerns of being malnourished, she had been opting not to eat as much to let her two children eat, and how that would affect her unborn child.
She wrote that her pregnancy was early enough that she could reconcile her faith in allowing her two other children to survive and that not giving birth to a malnourished child would also be the right thing to do for that child as well. In college ethics classes, I became enamored with her situation and had a dozen or more conversations with my grandmother, I read my great-grandmother's letters and heard the story as passed through the generations. I will always cherish those conversations with my grandmother.
This of course ultimately developed my personal beliefs. I am thinking of her and my grandmother today.
I’m in a same-sex marriage and my stomach dropped reading Clarence Thomas’s opinion and his reference to Obergefell. It wasn’t that long ago I wasn’t able to see my now-husband in the hospital — the emergency room - here in conservative Idaho. I do understand his opinion and context but even if legally sound, it affects me.
We the people of the United States of America know how to edit our living constitution and make the rights that we want a constitutional guarantee. It seems impossible at the moment with the divisiveness, polarization and in-fighting but we know that religion is on the decline and you will see that represented in elections in the coming decades. It is possible, we just don’t know the path today. It can be done, but it won’t be easy.
I’m sorry, this isn’t all that related to Hacker News. To relate it back, I guess I am saying that we’re hackers, we can hack society, we can hack belief systems, we can take unrelated ideas and bring them together to create something new just like we do inventing new categories of products. We can disrupt things through big ideas and through execution. If we want change, it will be a lot of hacking and hard work. After all, I think it was social / political hacking by the creators of this movement that got us here to today.