KANSAS CITY, Mo. – It's our spittle-flying national screaming match over abortion, more than any other issue, that has made Tutsis and Hutus out of Americans who used to think, ridiculous as it seems now, that they had a lot in common.
Without decades of well-financed mutual demonization in the war between those who see their adversaries as baby-killers on the one side and woman-haters on the other, we would never have been so primed for this insane cultural divide over a virus that doesn't care who we are or how we vote.
It's no accident, after all, that the mocking motto of pandemic denialists is "my body, my choice."
"It's very hard for us to be in the same room with most of these people" who don't think the way she and her husband do, pro-life and anti-mask Raytown, Missouri, doughnut shop owner Elisa Breitenbach posted during the Independence City Council meeting where a mask mandate was voted down.
So here we are, inhabiting a world where there's no moral difference between abortion and murder, according to some of the same people who love all babies in theory, but won't wear a mask to protect your unvaccinated children, or even their own.
You can't make me wear a piece of paper over my nose and mouth just because doing so might keep others from suffering a horrible death, they cry, right before quoting Patrick Henry. Oh, but I can make your 12-year-old bear her rapist's child, because a life is at stake.
Our wider conflict, let's face it, is only going to accelerate with this Texas abortion law that's about to take off like the Caldor Fire in California. Because the most extreme fears of abortion rights supporters were just eclipsed by reality.
A law that encourages Soviet-style cash prizes for neighbors who turn in neighbors they suspect of, say, giving a girl a ride to the Planned Parenthood clinic, does not look like a pro-life win to me. Unless, of course, the point of the war is more war, in which case it's a genius plan.
I wondered what a woman I know here in Kansas City who got pregnant as the result of a rape — nobody tell Todd Akin — would think of this new Texas law.
In the Catholic world in which she grew up, she said, abortion was not even part of the conversation. She not only had the baby, and then gave her up for adoption, but took her child back before the end of the 30 days she had to change her mind. "I love my child. And I didn't want her not to know who she was."
She's still Catholic — deeply so, which is how I got to know her. Yet it would not be an exaggeration to say that she, who not only didn't but wouldn't ever have ended a pregnancy, is grieving over what the Supreme Court has done here, in leaving the Texas law in place.
"I see these laws as the murder of the woman," she said. "It's a savage, rock-bottom, raw need for control."
After serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested, "they asked him, 'Why do you do this?' and he said, 'for that last ahhhh,'" — and here she exhaled. "It was for that control that only is given to God. It's 'I will be like God.'" So, too, she feels, are those who would spare women the difficult choices of autonomy.
After what happened to her as a young woman, she not only woke up in physical agony and covered in blood, but then was "treated by my family as that bad girl out having fun. My pain has never been validated; that's the price the woman pays."
It hurts her almost beyond description to think that that hasn't changed. Which it hasn't. And won't, as long as we can't even hear each other when we talk.
With so much money and political power on the line, just how does this war end? Without the kind of truce reached long ago in Western Europe, where abortions really are early, safe and far more rare, it's hard to imagine. Even if Roe v. Wade falls, the fight won't be over. And after nearly half a century, I'm pretty confident in predicting that no one will ever win.
