someone today, on a trans mailing list, asked: "how can we put our trust in the supreme court after Roe?"
and I.
you're older than me, where were you for bush v gore
The thing I very clearly remember from the Bush v Gore aftermath is that the media very effectively painted Al Gore as being completely unreasonable when in my eyes it was super obvious the republicans were trying to use voter suppression techniques to get their dumbass of a guy the Florida electoral votes. I was in 8th grade. It was clear and unmistakable.
Media message: nobody wants to spend a long time counting votes, got to know the result and get on with it!
My y2k teenage thoughts: well (I was still indoctrinated with the mistaken belief Bush was, let alone either side was, the good guy), but how can anyone know the result without an accurate count? Doing it wrong won't help anything.
Dear readers, they did not, in fact, help anything - except themselves, to as much as they could get.
I was fifteen when I watched nearly every adult in the country decide that voting didn't matter; that it was an exercise best left to nine unaccountable justices. It was very formative, and left me with zero illusions about trusting the system.
There has never been a point in my adult life where I have understood the SCOTUS to be a legitimate body, nor one interested in the health of our democracy. The fall of Roe is world-changing, but is also 100% the logical continuation of a much longer pattern.