It is time to clear the air.

I was at the meeting to which a local activist has been referring in social media posts, the purpose of which is to motivate people the get active in demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and, although I can understand his intensity and commitment, his repeated accounts of the meeting may contain facts, but they do not include all of the facts nor any nuance.

One of the topics on the agenda of the meeting was the call for an immediate cease fire in Gaza and an end to the Palestinian genocide. Although this was only one agenda item and not the first, it was known to be an important topic for the group’s co-chair and it was obvious that we were running through all the preceding agenda items as if they were not important in order to ge to the one the co-chair wanted to spend the most time on. As far as he was concerned, the other agenda items were in the way and unimportant.

This man is very well read and, while Palestine is a hot topic having a lot of people doing a lot of research since October, there is no way they will get anywhere near to where he is because he has been following events closely for years. It is understandable that his degree of concern far surpasses that of anyone around him and that, regardless how intense they might be, will never reach the level of his intensity. He, however, seemed not to see this or, worse, refused to accept a person’s intensity on any given topic must be measured against itself not against some one else being the benchmark.

What activist would not love for everyone with whom they deal to be as dedicated to the cause as they are, but just as filling various sized glasses to their rims brings them to their capacity, not all the capacities are equal when it comes to people’s intensity on any given topic. I have to accept the realistic capacity and not demand more than is possible. A shot glass filled to capacity, while unable to hold more, is filled to its capacity as a beer stein similarly filled is. I can’t put the same amount of liquid in both containers and complain when done that, although filled to its brim the shot glass will still hold less than the stein while both are full.

As the discussion on this item began, it was clear that this capacity difference existed and it was also clear that while the co-chair was centered on this topic from his position, there were others in the room that were viewing things on a broader level, and this was something he could not or would not grasp.

It would be nice if Joe Biden declared a ceasefire and a cessation of any support for Israel from the United States, but international entanglements are just that, entanglements, and are not always in boxes and along clear lines. You just do not walk out of the room assuming that this one action is all that is needed assuming there is nothing going on anywhere that is connected to that. Various countries are in agreements that benefit their country regardless how it affects other ones, and there are agreements within agreements among multiple countries that are at work and nothing can be a simple clean cut action.

If we view Bibi Netanyahu as some crazed leader, certainly Joe Biden knows he is and may also know what there may be in the shadows that this nut could misuse for his benefit and not ours in any way.

The problem at this meeting was that the co-chair would entertain no opinion that did not match his

exactly and this would result in the charge from the co-chair that you were pro-genocide without hearing what influenced your thinking to avoid an extreme action that looks good at the moment but might have ramifications later if the whole picture ian’t viewed.

When Michael Dukakis was running for re-election back in the 1980s, although he had done much good, he did not deliver on some important campaign promises and in the process insulted state workers among others. He had won by a landslide the first time, but too many people decided that if he won this time, the fact it was not a similar landslide would send the message to him that the state was somewhat displeased and this would motivate him to become more citizen-centric. Unfortunately this was not an organized approach that would have been impossible at any rate, and too many people sent the message leaving us to deal with his failure of a successor. Dukakis won in the next election, but he was more cautious and the citizenry a little shaken and cowed.

In the long run, although many of the mistakes made in the years between his governorships have been corrected, the state is still dealing with the affects of those years, many which are almost too subtle to be even noticed now. Those old battered “no Right On Red” signs are what is left of the governor’s objecting to the notion that idling at red lights when you could safely make the turn wasted gas. They are the relics of his hissy-fit when environmentalists dared to tell him what to do and why, when everyone knew the experts on petroleum and its affects on the people and the environment, the oil companies, his donors, said otherwise.

The chair’s suggestion that this approach be used now to send a message to Biden went a little too far when he suggested this committee actively work against Biden’s reelection until such time as he declares a ceasefire and withdraws all U.S. aid from Israel. What if we were so effective we couldn’t call the cattle back into the barn?

This might have been his issue and in his eyes the only issue, but others in the room saw things differently and for reasons important to them. However, anyone who expressed even the slightest concern was immediately labeled “pro-genocide” which let those in attendance know that whatever they had to say would be brushed aside with that accusation while their concerns and reservations were silenced.

I am a Gay man in my seventies who saw the changes since Stonewall. Hell. I worked for many of them in a variety of places at different times and in different political and religious environments. I knew what it took to get our rights and I have a pretty good idea how hard the battles will be to get them back if we lose them. This is a consideration when I am voting in an election where one candidate has pledged to take away my human rights. I was concerned that, while people felt warm and fuzzy because they had prevailed on one issue and moved on, I might suffer from the results with no one even noticing.

I was accused of not only being uninformed about genocide which automatically meant I was for it, but of viewing it from my privileged position as an American shielded from a true understanding of the affects of genocide or even an attempted one.

And this is why I feel compelled to clear the air.

There was no conscious effort to keep me from being Gay. The reality was that in my upbringing it was not a topic or consideration. I am amazed when people say they knew before elementary school that they were different when I, in my naivete, didn’t realize what I thought and did was so different when I thought thoughts were a variation of everyone’s thinking. I played some games because I liked them and avoided others because I didn’t. I liked art and music. My friends and siblings like them too in varying degrees so I did not think if I chose to draw rather than play a game of baseball I was exercising some huge personality difference. Because of this, I took forever to finally connect the dots that I just thought were, for the most part, similar to everyone until doing so showed me how wrong I had been. I was never good in math, so this lack of being able to add up the obvious made me a “late bloomer” and, as far as my timing, I decided I had to be who I was, throw open the closet door, read books, go to events, attempt to meet people, and enter my tribe just as AIDS hit.

That was my Welcome Wagon greeting into the Gay Community.

This unforeseen aspect of my future came out of nowhere and I was, as most people were, woefully ignorant as to what it was all about as healthy people I met were dead within weeks of that meeting from some Mediterranean old guy skin cancer. I was ready to handle as best I could what I was familiar with, but this aspect came as a total surprise.

As a Boomer, I was used to the routine that a disease could be eliminated by a Vaccine and if there wasn’t one, America would come up with one. I made it through polio and the various poxes, so, of course with this new disease there would be research, a vaccine, and then a cure. It was how medicine worked.

That is until it was decided for political reasons AIDS was God’s work.

Religious leaders saw a cash cow in using AIDS as a way to deal with the monster under the bed, totally fabricated stereotypes of Gay people useful in driving people to churches where collections would increase, and, if they could get the politicians to buy in, could get more of their Christo-fascist goals worked into laws. Demonizing a minority population was a traditional practice when your reasons for action are not based on reason, and we had lost the traditional monster because we saw with the Holocaust where such an approach led us to re-examine our own role in a culture that produced it. They had lost coerced prayer in public schools and women had gained some control over their bodies, none of which could be addressed head on and needed an approach that would first bring in the money with which they could buy politicians and since no one knew much about us, Gay people could serve that role and the religious pushed the idea that we as a people had gained too much and now God had decided to weed his garden and kill off the uppity Gay people.

Inspired by the success of religion wed to politics, wanting the political donations the religious leaders were promising, the federal government played along and watched us die.

Our lives were given over to political power and the money that could be raised.

Who cared that people were dying? The more religious leaders and politicians gained from the deaths, the more they were allowed.

Any saving of the Gay Community in the 1980s was the result of self preservation and the need to survive the government’s willful negligence and acceptance of religion based bigotry, and came from the targets of the genocide.

They not only watched us die, but did little to stop it. That is a form of genocide, and I was being told at the often misrepresented meeting that my “privilege” protected me from it and any true knowledge of what genocide is.

In 1985, a friend was hospitalized with AIDS complications. The hospital put him in a room alone, the room into which each shift would place their red hazardous material bags from all the hospital’s wards to be disposed of in the morning at trash pickup. A man with a nonexistent immune system had to share a room with hazardous material until rather vociferous complaints from friends changed that. The hospital may have admitted him but it had no intention to deal with him. He was, in their minds, there to die and they intended to just let that happen.

My fear that if the wrong people make up the next administration, the one that pledged to remove my rights, my fear that this loss of rights could sanction a future genocide of my people because of some religious or political belies is not pro-genocide.

The person who constantly refers to the people at the meeting as having been pro-genocide, uncaring, selfish is not being truthful and, sadly, in his intensity about genocide in Gaza, is misrepresenting those present and what they thought.

I survived an attempted genocide.

Many people I knew did not.

I had no privilege protecting me from that genocide and viewing what I faced in my Gay infancy as the result of privilege is beyond dismissive.

Yes, I oppose the genocide in Gaza.

In high school in the 1960s, I had a teacher who, because his parents were from Palestine, had served as a missionary there until he was brought back home because of some scuttle-butt about a possible impending war in the middle East. He had been removed from the conditions that resulted in the war in 1967. We learned in high school what was going on from someone who had lived there and continued to receive and pass on to us any updates he got. I also worked as an illustrator for a college textbook on the history of Middle East diplomatic since the First World War which meant I was in constant conversation with the scholars so my illustrations would be effective.

I am familiar with Palestine.

If I am to be faulted for anything, it is my concern that while I might make the lives of people elsewhere better, I might also make life at home impossible for my people. In the midst of obtaining my Creator endowed self evident rights, a death by virus was justification for denying those rights and preventing any further advances with death being the ultimate goal and tool to attain it. I watched almost a decade

of death by inaction and purposeful neglect and I know if given the chance, those who supported that, if they are back in office, will let it begin again in God’s name.

This is not pro-genocide. This is a target of an attempted genocide assaying how current events could erase the past and prevent the future.

The co-chair’s attempts to label me as “pro-genocide” to dismiss my legitimate concerns and the difficulty this introduces to a complicated situation shows a lack of a true understanding of genocide and who the victims had been, and it is not necessarily the same definition because it is based on differing sources and experiences.

They never locked us in refugee camps, but the idea to coral those of us who just wouldn’t die quietly in hospital rooms with bags of hazardous materials, had been a serious proposal. Manzanar was still around.

It is wrong to condemn one genocide while ignoring another, irrelevant?, genocide while telling the potential and actual victims of the attempt that they do not know what they had experienced and need others, perhaps the less privileged to explain it to them.

As a target of genocide I oppose genocide and resent I am being presented as the opposite as a strategy to bring people to a person’s way of thinking.

My concerns were and remain legitimate whether or not they fit another person’s mold.

He can oppose the Genocide in Gaza, but he cannot do it by denying and dismissing my life experiences.

Remember this when you read those who were at that meeting in question referred to as pro-genocide.

They are only pro-genocide because they do not measure up to this person’s standards which rise each time someone does.

Or did the attempted genocide of Gay people not qualify as serious enough to be acknowledged and is, therefore, so easy to ignore?

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