It was an all-too-familiar sight: an energized group of people, carrying homemade signs, lined up at the Village Green on Saturday. This time, not surprisingly, these were mostly girls – young women really – with a scattering of young men, protesting last week’s Supreme Court draft decision apparently knocking down Roe vs Wade.

Every passing motorist that gave a thumbs up brought forth cheers from the crowd. Horns honked, mostly in support I’m guessing, followed by more cheers. It was a beautiful early spring day, our first really, and spirits were high. Perhaps for most it was their first protest, though this generation of high schoolers hasn’t been shy, walking out of class last year to point out the perceived lack of school response to sexual assaults.

What’s the point of protesting anyway? It doesn’t change anything, or so a cynic might say. A hundred feet behind Saturday’s demonstration (and what feels like a hundred years ago) Shebang, our local, now extinct, street theatre group, marched in front of the post office, banging a huge drum as an impossibly tall, black-robed spectre on stilts roamed back and forth. The issue? The Iraq war, funded of course with our taxes. The day? An April 15 sometime in the early aughts.

The Iraq war, that started in 2003, was believed (and later confirmed) to be cooked-up in response to the 9/11 attacks; Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and, as it turned out, had no “weapons of mass destruction”. Our invasion of that country generated protests all around the Midcoast. Standing on bridges and holding signs, riding on packed buses all night to the big demonstrations in New York and Washington, writing letters, calling Congress people; we did our part to point out the debacle that we believed our country was perpetrating.

Of course, “we” doesn’t mean all of us. There are always two sides, and those protesting often got more middle fingers than thumbs up. Particularly from those involved in the military, either former soldiers or family members, each side believing they knew what was right for our country.

There was little to do that made a difference, and for many of my generation it was a conflicted time. We, those of us in our 70s and 80s now, came of age in the Vietnam War era. We grew up hearing about the self-sacrificing and principled generation that preceded us, the men and women who together defeated Nazism and Japan’s militarism.

Apparently, every other generation seems to get their war.

And sure enough, ours came around just as we were graduating high school, starting college or our work lives. War always affects all of us, though not everyone has a direct connection. Vietnam veterans, the young men who were drafted or enlisted to go over and fight for South Vietnam, are the old men of today. They’re oddly invisible it seems to me, much as the old men and women who protested the war at the time are. It’s as if everyone wants to forget they had anything to do with that war.

A far cry from the adulation heaped on the greatest generation.

The protests at the time were so extreme. Returning soldiers remember the vitriol of the demonstraters. In the heat of the moment, a moment that lasted from 1965 to 1973 when the war finally ended with the U.S. heliocoptering out of Saigon (much as we left Afghanistan!), words were hurled at them that can’t be unsaid. Today it’s debatable if this was commonplace or if such incidents were rare, but now urban legend.

The country was given the chance for a do-over when Iraq and Afghanistan soldiers returned. Suddenly everyone was a hero and thanked endlessly for their service. “We were just doing our job,” say some of those soldiers, embarrassed by the hoopla. We can’t seem to get it right.

Now, here we are, reduced to cheerleaders for this next war. Thankfully, Ukraine’s is not our war, though increasingly we seem to be getting involved through the gift of weapons and intelligence. Rather than protest we hang blue and yellow flags and weep for the horrible injustice of Putin’s “war of choice”.

Then, suddenly, overnight last week, we have been handed a whole other war to fight, when we learned what the Supreme Court justices are cooking up. This one, it seems to me, is worthy of Vietnam-era protest, for in addition to what many of us saw as our country involved an unjust war in Southeast Asia, women were finding ourselves in the middle of another.

It was the deeply personal situation of being on the forefront of the sexual revolutioln when abortion was not only illegal but downright dangerous. The sixties weren’t unique in that; people had been having sex without the benefits of marriage for eons, forever in fact, and women had been left with the result. Pregnant.

There were a few ways to resolve it. A shotgun marriage, which could turn out just fine (or end in disaster) or surrendering the child for adoption. Of course, a woman could keep her baby without benefit of marriage, but she and her child were, to put it mildly, frowned upon by regular society for all time. Thankfully, those attitudes are changing.

Oddly, Wally and I were each products of the last two solutions. I, a war baby of sorts, was put up for adoption by my mother at birth. He, in a sense a war baby too, but of the first World War, was kept by his mother. However, to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy, his mother’s ex-husband, a WWI veteran with lungs damaged by poison gas, came over to the Augusta hospital and signed baby Wallace’s birth certificate.

His actual father, another WW I veteran, hung out in the wings. Not sure if he was anywhere around at the time, but he did resurface long enough to be in a photo with his little son. And then promptly, within a year or two, he died of tuberculosis in a Rhode Island VA hospital.

Like all Maine towns, big or small, news gets around. Do you think anyone was fooled by the O’Brien name tacked onto that new baby? Everyone knew John O’Brien lived on the far side of town with his spinster sisters and his three kids, while his ex-wife lived with her other two little ones near the Capitol.

I got legally adopted, new name, new parents, while my birth mother and father remained mysterious beings I could only fantasize about as I grew up in a loving and secure home. I was 60 years old before I learned that my father had commanded an LST (the amphibious craft that enabled troops to land directly on the shore) at the invasion of Anzio, Italy in January 1944, preceding D-Day by several months.

January 1944. The month my pregnant mother finally went to the doctor with her mother, who confirmed her condition and made plans to take care of it. Those plans included her incarceration in a maternity home in Chicago, and upon my birth in May, giving me to The Cradle, an Evanston adoption agency.

So as my father fought his battle, my mother fought hers. Mostly an invisible and unspoken battle, though I do have a photo of her taken in July when I was already on my way to my “forever home” (reminds me of a rescue dog!). She’s wearing a two-piece bathing suit – hardly a bikini! – and her tummy looks suspiciously poofy, just like all post-partum tummies look. Since I never got to meet her —she died at 43 – this tiny visual of my once-existence inside her body is eloquent.

When the sixties happened, when the sexual revolution happened, greatly helped along by the Pill (if you could figure out how to get it), the whole thing was out in the open. Girls still held out for marriage, but lots didn’t. There’s no way to know how many did and how many didn’t, but pill or no pill, pregnancy happened.

And so did abortions. Some ended badly. A friend was left infertile after hers. Another was dropped off on a NYC street corner to be picked up by a stranger-accomplice and taken to the doctor who performed it. No one made the decision to abort her pregnancy lightly. No one I knew was using it as birth control.

The issue is being done to death by the media, either by the right trying to find out who leaked the draft decision or by the left laying out all the ramifications of enforced pregnancy on women unable to handle a child. But here’s an angle I haven’t heard much if any discussion about.

And that’s men and their role in pregnancy. It’s not all about women and their bodies, after all. Nobody’s experienced immaculate conception that I know of. So how does this affect men? A pregnancy, like most everything in life, has two sides, can be looked at from two perspectives.

So his sperm and her egg make an embryo that can grow into a baby. A baby that carries both their DNA, both their hopes and futures too. A baby that needs constant and loving care for years and years. As someone said on Mothers Day, “who could imagine that a baby will steal your heart for the rest of your life?” It's also a baby that will cost a bundle every year until, hopefully it becomes self-supporting. And even then it won’t leave your heart.

Has anyone figured out what all the un-aborted babies that might be born once Roe is gone will cost the men who started them? Won’t he have to pay child support for the kid? Forever? Or at least until his progeny reaches 18. I think that’s a legitimate question and I’d like to hear the pro-lifers’ answer to it. I’d especially like to hear what the men who support abolishing R v W think their responsibility should be.

If you don’t believe abortion is okay, don’t have one. It’s that simple.

School

The school committee invites LCS families as well as townspeople to the Open Town Meeting, Wednesday, May 25, 6 p.m. to discuss and vote on the school budget.

Note that eighth grade graduation is June 21 and the last day of school, including Field Day is June 22.

Congratulations to three middle school musicians – Ward Morrison, Zoe Rugg, and Zev Whitcomb performed at the District Three Music Festival in Freeport. They were chosen along with about 50 other kids from Midcoast schools.

COVID in Lincolnville

After several weeks of no COVID cases in the school the virus is rising again. During last week there were three cases in grades K-2, 1 in grades 3-5, 7 in the middle school, and five cases among the staff for a total of 16. Masks are optional at this time, but perhaps it’s a good idea to send the kids off wearing theirs.

French Cemetery

This coming Sunday, May 15, there will be a clean-up party in the French Cemetery, 1-4 p.m. Refreshments will be provided.

Have you been to this historic old cemetery? It’s located next to and behind Dot’s on Atlantic Highway. The entrance, just north of Dot’s looks like a driveway to the house at 2469 Atlantic Highway, which it is, but it’s also the way in to the French Cemetery. Just pull in straight. Wandering around an old burying ground (Maiden Cliff’s Elenora French is buried there) with the purpose of cleaning it up is a nice way to spend a spring afternoon. Bring the kids, rakes, gloves, and leaf blowers!

Window Dressers

It’s that time of year, now that we don’t need them, to think about getting window inserts for next winter. WindowDressers Insulating Window Inserts is now taking orders. Contact them through their website. They’ll come out and measure, then put you on their list for next fall’s Community Build. I’ve had several for years and they make a huge difference in this old farmhouse. Windows, even newer ones, can be drafty when the wind blows (and when doesn’t it blow??). These inserts make the whole house cosier.

Library

There’s still time to order geraniums and native shrubs and trees to benefit the Library. The order deadline is May 11 with pickup on May 21 at the Library’s plant sale, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Order by email  or call 706-3896.

If you have perennials or seedlings to donate to the plant sale please drop them off behind the Library, potted and labeled with the name and color, if applicable, of the plant by May 19.

This is a great way for us all to support the Library!