If you ever happen to find yourself in Waskom, Texas, a tiny burg across the Louisiana state line off I-20, a place best described as "twister bait," you might wanna head on over to the Great American Mural that covers the front of the We Buy Houses 123 building in the middle of town. It's a mighty huge thing, what with its portrayal of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in a dull, gray New York City; an extraordinarily masculine Statue of Liberty; and images of Waskom's heroes, including the fire chief and Turbo, a local dog who has two purple hearts from his time in Afghanistan. This is not to mention the aircraft and helicopter on there, the Iwo Jima part, and more.
It's charming in a hyper-nationalist way. It looks like if Shepard Fairey went bankrupt and figured he'd grift the rubes for some quick cash.
Yeah, they love them some Uhmerka there in Waskom. I bet all 2200 of the locals just love the fuck out of Uhmerka. And the Waskom City Council decided to prove just how fucking much they love Uhmerka by passing a local law that defies the U.S. Supreme Court, which is absent from the mural.
Yup, the five-white-guy council unanimously voted to ban abortion in Waskom, except in cases of "rape, incest or serious risk to the mother's life." It's obviously a completely unenforceable, utterly useless law. But Waskom won't be shown up by those uppity states like Alabama and Mississippi. The council declared Waskom a "sanctuary city for the unborn," which, get it?, is a totally hilarious slap in the face to sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants. Take that, libtards.
(Question: If an undocumented immigrant in Waskom is pregnant and a fetus is a person at the time of conception, is the fetus now American? If not, is Waskom a sanctuary city for the undocumented unborn? I need to know the limitations here.)
The country is going through a period of peak madness about abortion rights. I was on the phone with a pal in a deep red part of North Carolina last night who said he generally tries to avoid talking politics down there, but he found himself in a conversation about it with a man, an acquaintance from Virginia. The man said he didn't understand how anyone could vote for Democrats because we allow doctors to take babies who are just born and kill them with a brick.
My response was "Ok, first off, that's fucking insane. Second, a brick? Who needs that mess? Babies are easier to kill with your bare hands."
Apparently, the man explained, New York passed a law that said it was cool to commit infanticide by brick. My pal said to the man, "Yeah, that's not in there. Did you read the New York law?" No, the man said, but he had heard. "That's your problem," my pal explained. "You heard. You don't know."
But no one gives a shit about science and reality. I regularly get people telling me on the Twitter machine that liberals support murdering newborns. That's where the conversation on abortion is right now for too fucking many Americans. In other words, there is no conversation. When people wholeheartedly believe something that is completely, patently, blatantly untrue, your puny facts aren't going to put a dent in that level of delusional stupidity.
Waskom, Texas, doesn't have a clinic that performs abortions. The nearest one is across the state line, in Shreveport, Louisiana, about 30 miles away. It's over 160 miles to the one in Dallas. So no woman is going to get an abortion in Waskom that she doesn't induce herself. And the jury's still out on whether that means Killion's Pharmacy is gonna carry the morning after pill. Either way, abortion isn't a an issue in Waskom.
What is a problem there is meth. They found e coli in the town's water source. There have been at least two murders this year, which gives Waskom a higher murder rate than most of the big cities in the United States, as well as a number of assaults.
Like so many other places in this damned land, the yahoos have been convinced that something that isn't an issue at all must take precedent over real issues. That protecting a fetus is more important than securing the lives of the actually living. Here is how one Waskom resident put it on Facebook: "The Town of Waskom agreed to run the city according to the will of God in regards to the Right To Life. We expect to be challenged but God is on our side so we have faith that every challenge will be overcome with prayer and steady faithfulness to do the Lord's Will."
You gotta know what you're up against. Your Twitter or Insta feeds aren't gonna tell you that. This shit is out there and it's nuts. They think we're bashing in babies' heads with bricks. You're not gonna convince that person that they're wrong. You're not gonna rationalize and present reasonable counter arguments. You gotta write them off for now and concentrate on shoring up the power of the sane people.
