Editorial: On Current Events, and Today's Abortion Rights Decision.

Hello, dear readers. Here on The Memory Cache blog, it’s once again Rock and Roll Friday, the fourth Friday of each month, where I try to post several reviews of books I’ve read and shows I’ve seen that relate to popular music and the music industry. In keeping with this tradition, I have posted a book review of Dave Grohl’s book The Storyteller, and the fascinating documentary interviews of Paul McCartney called McCartney 3,2,1. After all, the show must go on, and we need to keep trying to find joy in our lives, and things to celebrate and enjoy.

But it’s hard to feel celebratory in the wake of this morning’s expected but disastrous Supreme Court decision reversing Roe vs. Wade, and striking down abortion rights for women across much of this country. There is particularly ominous language in Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, which states clearly that today’s decision, and its underlying legal theory, are laying the basis to roll back many other personal rights of privacy, and human rights, that we have enjoyed and come to depend upon for the past half century. Same sex marriage? Contraception? Interracial marriage? All of these rights and others we take for granted now hang by a thread.

At the same time, we have so many other deeply concerning issues confronting us. Of course, there is the lingering trauma and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic which has caused such havoc to our lives and the world for the past two+ years. There is the ongoing struggle over reasonable gun control measures, and the shock of the constant string of mass casualty shootings, and daily gun fatalities in neighborhoods across the country. There are the hearings in Congress that are revealing the full extent of the attempts to overthrow our democratic system of government in 2020 that led to the January 6th uprisings. There is the danger that these subversive strategies are ongoing, and are now aimed at completing successfully this fall, and in the 2024 election, the insurrection that failed the last time. There is the dangerous and destructive war in Ukraine. And then there is the inflationary moment in the economy, which hits many of us so deeply in our personal finances, and our everyday standard of living.

Behind all of these unending issues and worries sits the most catastrophic looming crisis of all: the climate change which is rapidly destabilizing the planetary environment upon which we all depend for our survival and prosperity. I fear the urgency of trying to solve this confoundingly difficult global problem is increasingly being lost in the noise about all the other more immediate and localized crises that hit the headlines every day.

I believe most of us are trying in some way to figure out what we can do to help. I wonder that too. I know voting for responsible people, and doing what we can to support good people in public service who are trying to fix things and make them better, can go some ways. Standing up to authoritarians who would undermine our democratic system is going to become increasingly necessary and urgent in the days ahead. We will all need to get more involved to save ourselves and the world we want to live in.

For myself, I intend to keep using this blog to bring useful information to your attention. Of course, some of it will be just for fun, and to help keep us sane, but as much as possible, I will be highlighting books and shows that call out problems, identify solutions, explain what’s going on, and fight injustice. I hope you’ll continue to come by the site, and see what’s new, and perhaps it can help you be informed and provide tools for understanding your own situation as it develops, and doing what you can to respond constructively to events as they unfold.

Best wishes to you and yours, and try to stay positive. It looks like a bumpy road up ahead.