Bearing the Weight of Change
It is June 25th, 2022. It is the day after the Supreme Court overturned a nearly fifty year old constitutional right for women in our country.
We all know this is not a new war for women in America, but this one stings. On the very same day that the constitutional right to bear arms was reaffirmed, women have been stripped of their constitutional right to bear control of their bodies. We are once again reminded that the purpose of our existence is to serve our womanly role behind men; as determined by a justice system that is unrepresentative of the citizens it rules over.
The feelings that continue to flood in through my grieving process are all that of anger, sorrow, and defeat. I’m torn by the ambition to turn this anger into ammunition to continue the fight my fore sisters began centuries before me, and the hopelessness that my actions won’t make a difference anyway and to concede. The conflicting perspectives end with the same thought: how do you think the great women throughout history felt when they were met with a similar resistance? They did not stop pushing when there was equal or greater force fighting against them; their endurance outlasted the pressure, and carved the pathway for greater barriers to be broken. This is a key moment in our lifetime when we are the ones who must now bear the weight of change.
Living in Georgia the past three years through Covid, the Trump era and the 2020 election, the Black Lives Matter movement, and now the overturning of Roe v. Wade, feels like I am in a repeating cycle of counter arguments and unpopular opinions. Some days I do feel like I should just go back to Colorado, where it is so much easier to speak about ongoing societal issues. And what I am reminded of, again, is that the burden to unveil differing perspectives across the nation may now rest with me, as an underrepresented transplant in this Southern sector of society. Every word I speak in this process is an indisputable perspective incapable of being ignored as “fake news,” and that’s the resolve powering my endurance.