Left-wingers will not be ignored

     There is a terrible inevitability to tragedy. The characters are locked in their roles in a way that, afterward, seems foreordained. Willy Loman goes out on the road, trying to sell his unnamed product. Mary Tyrone slips upstairs for more medicine. “Another shot in the arm!” her son shouts. Oedipus takes a wife.
     And while each struggles against the tightening bonds of fate, it’s as if they’ve been seized at the elbows by the marshals of implacable destiny and are being firmly escorted toward a grim appointment.
     Hard not to feel that way since New Hampshire anointed Donald Trump, while Republican VP hopefuls strain forward like a classroom of eager 2nd graders, arms waving, straining in their sockets — “Me me me!” — the tone of the mainstream media sags, like a newspaper left out in the rain, already damp with defeat.
     Meanwhile, Democrats assemble into their traditional circular firing squad. When I read an article by Audrey Hettleman in Wednesday’s Sun-Times about a group called Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws: Coalition for Reproductive Justice and LGBTQ+ Liberation planning a protest the day before the start of the Democratic National Convention in August, my first thought was: Why? Protest to whom?
     Aren’t the Democrats the good guys regarding reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights? Did I miss something? Maybe the BOUL:CRJ&LGBTQ+L would prefer to go to Milwaukee to bring their message to the Republican convention, but lack carfare. It seems a shoestring operation.
     ”For years the Democrats have taken us for granted, thereby enabling the far right’s attacks on us,” their press release stated.
     What’s that line from “Fatal Attraction”? “I’m not going to be ignored!”
     It can’t be mere wounded pride. Can it? I tried to follow their logic. So if only the Democrats had ... what? Taken them more seriously ... then those Republicans would ... I couldn’t quite make sense of it.
     Maybe they could offer insight. I caught organizer Andy Thayer getting into an Uber.
     ”We’ve had 50 years of the anti-abortion Hyde amendment,” he began. “Plenty of years when the Democrats had both houses of Congress and the presidency and could have repealed that.”
     The Hyde Amendment, for those just joining us, is a 1976 law restricting the federal government from funding abortion. Rather than repeal it, Congress has approved it, year after year. Then again, most Americans, while supporting choice for themselves, are against the government paying for other people’s abortions.
     Thayer argued that by assuming those on the left will fall in line, Democrats shift right, drawn by the gravitational pull of Republicans.
     ”Over the last half century, the Democrats have played a game of stealing the Republicans’ thunder,” he said. “The classic example of when President Obama took Romneycare, getting the Republicans to go even further right, denouncing their previous plan.”

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