Ends and Odds: The Ravings Of An Old Man. Chapter 10 of "'Why Feminism Didn't Lead To Socialsm' by Dave Jaffe

    Why Feminism Didn't Lead To Socialism. Chapter 10 by Dave Jaffe.
        


     In the last 50 years some groups in North America saw their lives improve. Yet all the changes triggered sometimes violent reactions. In November 1989 Marc Lepine a deranged violent man killed 14 students at the University of Montreal. Lepine of course was mentally unbalanced but he was totally anti-feminist. "The media tried to show him as a lonely mentally ill mad man," one women's rights advocate told this writer in the early 1990's. "Yet his main target was feminists." Lepine killed himself after his rampage. Yet he had compiled a list of prominent Quebec feminists that he also planned to kill.
   In the United States one former policeman killed Harvey Milk an outspoken gay advocate in San Francisco in the late 1970's and also murdered George Moscone the city's mayor. Everywhere where gays, feminists environmentalists and others came forward to protest they were often met with state sanctioned violence. "You always have a backlash," the late Rosemary Brown said in effect
 "whenever people demand their rights." Many activists faced threats of violence from hate filled conservatives. The abortion provider Henry Morgenthaler was nearly stabbed by an enraged right-to-lifer when he opened his  Toronto clinic in the 1980's. Some doctors who provided abortions were killed or had their clinics bombed.
     To-day a resurgent right wing still tries to strip many groups of their rights, And Canada and the U.S. remain profoundly unequal countries. Over 6 million Canadian adults can't afford to go to a dentist while the  head of the Royal Bank of Canada earned over $10 million in 2015. Over 200,000 Canadians sleep on the streets or in shelters every night. Meanwhile in the U.S. one black clergyman vowed to launch a campaign against poverty, He put the number of poor Americans at over 140 million. This means that close to two in every five Americans are poor and are struggling to survive.
     "The answer is blowing in the wind," Bob Dylan sang over 55 years ago. The solutions  to social injustice are still blowing in the wind.