Category Archives: cartoon file

The rain was a sign

It was the morning of election day and as I had promised a friend I would hold a sign for him at the nearby polling station, I took the rare step of setting my alarm clock so I could be on time for my 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. shift, being there when the polls opened and would still have time to vote in my polling station and accomplish the number of errands I needed to run the rest of the day.

I gathered my lawn chair, the candidate sign, a thermos of hot coffee, and a kindle so I could pass the time reading if I were to end up being the only sign holder for any candidate present. At the last minute, after consulting my weather apps on my phone and computer, the Weather Chanel, and Alexa who all forecast a chance of rain, I grabbed an umbrella as I went out the door.

“Chance” means there is a possibility, but the monsoon I walked out into was a reality.

I walked to the where I was supposed to be, choosing a corner spot at which, unlike the usual gathering  of sign holders at the entrance to the parking lot and being seen by a limited crowd, I chose a street corner nearby so the sign could be seen from multiple directions and by anyone coming up the side street and using a rear entrance to the parking lot.

I sat there a good hour and a half, huddled under my umbrella wrapped in my long hooded “Goth” coat.

The people for the other candidates huddled in the rain by the entrance and looked rather bedraggled as none had brought an umbrella. My choice of seat location had the practical purpose of greater visibility, but it may have also eliminated the hatred of those who would have to be standing in the rain while I sat below my umbrella keeping dry in their midst.

These people were holding signs for those candidates for city council and mayor who had been chosen in the primary by only 6% of eligible voters who voted in the primary last month.

Eventually rain gave way to wind, which at one point tore my sign from the stick sending it across the street, and, in time, sun.

By the time my shift was over and I had gone home for my breakfast before setting out on the day’s errands and to vote, the sun had come out and the temperature was heading to 65 degrees.

There had been a lot of griping about the candidates for the various city council positions and criticism of past performance but with only 6% of the eligible voters going to the primary polls, the city voters had pretty much left the decision as to who will be on the ballot to just a few people.

Yes, there was a reaction to this low turnout and people gvetched about who was chosen, and with all that is going on in the city, this should have motivated people, if not shamed them, to get out and vote. You would assume this would be so with all the online criticism of city government and all the suggestions, request, and demands as to what the city should be doing.

If one sees bigger numbers than previous ones as a sign of success, then the people of the city should be happy that the final tally of voters increased this election.

As a matter of fact, it doubled.

Yes, 6% of eligible voters gave us the ballot and 13%, more than twice as many, made the final choice that 100% will have to live with.

87% of the voting public stayed home.

To end any useless discussions or gripe sessions so you can get back to your beer at the bar, just ask the person opining if they voted on November7. There’s an 87% chance the answer will be “No”.

Easiest way to turn off a dripping faucet.

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just a thought

When he ran for the office of governor, Michael Dukakis made quitea few promises and people looked what they heard. However, reality set in after he took office and a lot of promises could not be met because they were nice to have made, but impossible or extremely difficult to pull off and it appeared Dukakis had gone back on his word.

At the next election voters wanted to send him a message, especially state employees. Whereas he had won the first election by a landslide, the idea was to have him win but decidedly not in a landslide so he would see how much he displeased the people and would do better during his second term.

Unfortunately, too many people sent the message so the result was his opponent winning by a comfortable majority and we end up with Governor Edward King, and that did not go all that well.

Had the right number of people sent the message, we would have had a better governor the second time around as it was later found when he ran again and won that he had learned his lesson.

The idea was a good one. Too many people seeing that, chose to send the message. 

Initial gentrification may seem to be going very well and the city wants the new money to know they have a place to settle. The whole city is “built to suit”. In the process more and more property is being bought up and remodeled once they get the “vermin” out.

Controlled, it could be good, but if the message gets out to too many and the city becomes the center of available high end housing, the glut could cause a decrease in prices and loss of investment as rents will have to be lowered to the point those who are not moneyed can move back in, a situation that could have been avoided had the city not gone stupid with landlords selling decent affordable homes for the prices speculators are willing to pay, driving the locals out of town in the hope of making a killing in real estate.

When the malls came it killed the downtown area as stores moved out and left a lot of emptiness that the city is trying to deal with. 

On-line shopping is killing malls just as they did the downtowns, leaving vast almost empty building with a few stores keeping the mall on life support with many malls being repurposed to anything but mercantile.There are many caverness buildings surrounded with huge parking lots waiting for no one to show up.

People stayed with a city on life support and kept it alive enough to have the promise of good investments reviving the comatose. But rather than guarantee a balance between those already here and those they would like to come, they are choosing the Dukakis Message approach and acting like every new luxury apartment and condo will have someone who wants one no matter how many there are.

The eagerness to benefit from the real estate gouging boom may result in too much supply and a surprising lack of demand.

And tumble weeds.

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the year is 2060

I went to two community meetings in the last week.

The one in Dartmouth MA dealt with the increase of hate crimes and hate speech in the area and what might be done to keep the Red Wave from becoming a South Coast Tsunami with book bans, newly resurrected anti minority and Gay hate speech, politicians who want to return the country to the 1950s, and what we as a a community can do to nip it in the bud before it has a chance to take root or combat any attempts presently being made in this regard.

The meeting in New Bedford was a little different as it was called by the ADL and the city’s Human Rights Commission in response to what worried people in Dartmouth, signs of which have been seen in the city. At this meeting the two sponsoring groups gave presentations and named resources and  ways to contact them, and the FBI was present to clear up such things as what is illegal hate speech as oppose someone just being a jerk so that we can concentrate on the real threats and not get distracted by things we may not like but are not illegal. This was important.

At both meetings there was a good crowd with the New Bedford meeting spilling into the hallway from the main public library’s third floor meeting room.

The present climate was explained and members of the sponsoring organizations as well as the District Attorney, an agent from the FBI’s regional office, and a police liaison took part in a panel, answering questions from those in attendance most of which dealt with clarifications between what is real and what is urban legend about relevant laws and what can locals do.

After the meeting, I met a young woman who had asked the panel about what young people could do. She was an African American, female, high school student and she wanted to form some sort of group at the high school to combat hate, not an easy thing when dealing not just with wrong thinking, but peer pressure. Although I do have some notoriety in the political and social justice realm, I am realistic to have learned over the years that doing well in one area does not confer doing well in all, so I introduced her to someone potentially more useful for her purposes.

But she was alone.

In the spring, a social justice organization got the high school LGBT students all riled when the wrong candidate won, and used the kids as pawns leading them to believe protesting the election results was a realistic approach. The reason for the useful student action was the election of a city council candidate who a few years earlier had posted puerile Trans jokes on his private social media page that this group hoped would scuttle his election when these posts were made public two weeks before the election.

When using the social media posts did not work, the group turned to using the kids.

If this group and others had been sincere in what they were doing, they would have made sure that the students had organized since the action of the previous May to not only monitor this council member’s performance to see if anything anti-Trans were to come up and to monitor the whole city for the actions and attitudes that would bring hate to the wider community. Although assured by the area’s LGBT organization that  things were done since that event, I.E. a once a month counselor because only troubled Gays need attention, the rest can find guidance and answers on their own, I guess, there has been no publicly visible LGBT students presence at political events.

This one high school kid was not the representative of all the others nor should that burden be placed on her. She was there, no one else was.

There was no visible Gay presence in the room, something that struck me as odd since there is an organization that is supposed to protect the community and there is the high school thing. However, as in the previous meeting, those most likely to be objects of hate actions and speech were not there in the audience or up on the dais explaining the impact on their community.

The audience was an multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-gendered gathering of concerned older people in the majority with a sprinkling of those under forty and a mere soupcon of those under 30, and only one high school student, Black student, and female student, all the same person.

Mattacine: WWII Vets

Women’s right to Bodily Autonomy. WWII Vets and Boomers.

Stonewall Rebellion. WWII Vets and Boomers.

1989 Massachusetts Equality act. Boomers, 

Title IX. Boomers.

End to school bullying. Boomers plus pre-Millennials

End of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. Boomers plus pre Millennials

Marriage Equality. Boomers and pre-Millennials

Rights of all LGBT+ students in Oklahoma City. Boomer

National Marriage Equality. Boomers

See, we have been there and are still here fighting to keep what we won and got to experience for a small while, so that those for whom we won those things could have them from now on.

The people of color like most others in that library room were older, quite a few of an age that would dismiss them as targets of white supremacist hate speech now, and few of the whites would be likely to go to the “White Side” as they would already be rather set in their ways and the time and energy wasted on them could be better spent influencing impressionable youth.

I sat next to a twenty something couple and did see someone I knew who was young, but that was pretty much it.

Another room filled with older people concerned about what the world is becoming while those who would be living in that world were not present.

Other than me, there was no one there representing me or the community of which I am a member. I wore my rainbow color shirt to announce my presence and to see if any fellow travelers might be in the room. There may have been some, but of the familiar faces I saw in the room having attended rallies, meetings, and other activities with most of them and I am often their unspoken Gay token, I saw no one in the audience nor on the dais.

Yet the DA referenced Sexual Orientation based hate in his noting what crimes have been committed in the past but not so much now, if only because they were not among the reported numbers 

So it’s two-for-two, but who’s counting?

Me.

Being called a part of the problem because I choose to be called Gay and not the name being reassigned whether I like it or not, Queer.

Being told that as an old man who has had my rights I do not know what it is to be without them like the young kids who do not care to show up will be.

Being told I do not understand the hurt when someone uses a derogatory term about your humanity which I can only assume makes being called “homogenized”, “sissie”, or “Queer”  not count.

We older people just do not care I am told as I sit in rooms filled with those who do while those who should be there have an explanation why it was too inconvenient to show up at a meeting or have a representative there if you are a politico or an organization.

ADL and the Human Rights Commission called the meeting. It was introduced by my friend and local Imam, and ended with a prayer by another friend, also older. So religion, at least the Abrahamic ones, were there. I saw an atheist friend a few rows over and back, and there was at least one Gay man and one high school student.

Representation should not be our burden.

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not here

Back in the mists of time, the local Acushnets, like most Native American tribes, had ceded land for settlers’ use, but not necessarily with the understanding that when Europeans are given access to land, they will assume ownership.

We give it the lofty name Manifest Destiny and claim it is how God wants it.

The area on the South Coast of what would become the state of Massachusetts was given over by Massasoit and his son, Wamsutta, in 1652 with the signed document beginning,

“Know all men by these presents, that I, Wesamequen, and Wamsutta my son, have sold unto Mr. William Bradford, Captain Standish, Thomas Southworth, John Winslow, John Cooke and their associates, the purchasers or old-comers, all the tract or tracts of land lying three miles eastward from a river called Cushenagg, to a certain harbour called Acoaksett, to a flat rock on the westerward side of said harbour.”

Eventually the Russel family came into possession of what would become New Bedford which at one point became the City that Lit the World and was home to a lot of money and rich people. This latter was the result of the industries of whaling, fishing, cloth manufacturing, the city’s Holy Trinity, with other acolyte industries sprinkled in all of which relied on Europe’s poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

There were a lot of Black people as this was a place to escape to in the ante-bellum days. There were many people from the Lusophone world as whaling relied on wind and currents, and Islands like the Azores and Cabo Verde were natural stops during a voyage where crew members were added because the ship left port shorthanded or deserted crew needed to be replaced who went with the ship and ended up here.

As manufacturing grew and workers were needed, by and large, they weren’t from the most desirable class to please the Guilded Age. If you weren’t a person of color, chances are you were somewhere on the sliding scale of “poor white Trash”.

Recently, even though Bristol County got rid of its white supremacist, anti-immigrant sheriff, quite surprisingly there has been an uptick with racism and white supremacy on the South Coast.

I lived in Oklahoma where the supremacist crowd demanded that whites “take back the (your location here)” when they had actually taken it from the people who had already been there. White supremacists coming to this town demand White people take it back not realizing if the people who were entitled to take it back were anything but White guys.

They claim they are the superior people, the only ones who actually count.

In 1843 the state of Massachusetts decided stop fighting the tide, to stop shoveling the excrement into it choosing instead to agree with the supremacists that they were indeed the benchmark of humanity and passed  

General laws: Part 1:Title XV: Section 102. 

 “(a) All persons within the commonwealth, regardless of sex, race, color, creed or national origin, shall have, except as is otherwise provided or permitted by law, the same rights enjoyed by white male citizens, to make and enforce contracts, to inherit, purchase, to lease, sell, hold and convey real and

personal property, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, penalties, taxes, licenses, and exactions of every kind, and to no other.

So a group of very White men, New England Yankees with a heavy Boston Brahman bent, acknowledge their superiority and selflessly chose to extend it to all. 

New people from other places are demanding we insult those who passed that law and those who built this city and the whole of the South Coast by undoing what they had done.

This was a White Man’s law. 

If one reviews the history, if those who have the right to reclaim the land are nothing by like White, and to demand taking something back requires being aware of the chain of ownership so you are aware when the taking back begins and to whom it will lead.

And besides, initiation is the sincerest form of flattery, so, making people equal to White guys is quite the compliment.

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geography lesson

Although looking at the map of the state of Massachusetts people will easily see the coastline, what they may not know is that  it is divided into sections.

From New Hampshire to the beginning of Boston’s northern border, it is the North Shore. It has its own topography and geology. Where did Cape Anne come from? Its rocks exist only there on this continent, and in ancient times it was valuable to the indigenous people on the East Coast who would travel hundreds of miles to get some.

Its major city had been Salem in the 1600s and the society that spread out from it had its own identity. There have been farmers like elsewhere but the soil, the rocks, the natural resources determined their methods of farming and what they produced was what could be grown. There was fishing as it was on the coast, but what the North Shore fished for was not as wide ranging or as lucrative as it was further south.

Starting at the southern border of Boston stretching down to the northern part of Cape Cod on the mainland side of the Canal is the South Shore. Plymouth is there, but with the arrival of the Puritans with their dislike of the Pilgrims, starting in 1630 Boston controlled and limited any competition to it and the South Shore with its own typography attracted a population among whom were farmers ad fishermen who approached each differently than on the North Shore. 

There is a different atmosphere and attitude in both places as the North Shore became more commercial in many ways and the South Shore overtime began to attract people looking for fancy homes in quiet areas away from the city and at one point became the Irish Riviera as it became the place for vacation homes of those of Irish descent in Boston who eventually became eligible to purchase summer homes by the sea.

For all intents and purposes, as far as the state is concerned, the only shores that count are the ones that are stopped by the city of Boston on one side and the Cape Cod Canal on the other with a pull toward Boston like a magnet as it was the place from which the suburbs grew.

The North and South Shores favor Boston and it favors them.

What lurks below the Cape is the states stepchild, the kid they send to the attic when guests come over, the South Coast that goes from Wareham on the mainland side of the Canal to Rhode Island and like Lawrence and Lowell had been industrial powerhouses for the state and one, New Bedford was the city that lit the world, first when it supplied the whale oil for lighting and then when its power plant had been used in the 1960s to jump start the East Coast electric power grid and end the huge blackout.

The needs of the South Coast are different than those of the other Shores and the Cape, but the state keeps referring to the area as the South Shore, which it certainly is not, assuming whatever they claim they have done for the South Shore should keep us happy. In reality, they have not only not addressed the local needs but they feel happy with themselves for having had when in reality they gave what they claim they gave us what the actually gave to someone else because they can’t even recognize their own kid. It is as if the South Coast asks for needed food but is supplied with the clothing the South Shore had asked for so it got it too. 

Statewide organizations as well as state government have this idea that if the totally different South Shore got something, the South Coast, being the same place got it too.

Working with state organizations, especially political ones and the state government is the same as having every package you are expecting from Amazon delivered to a wrong address and you are told that the package has been delivered and that is as far as you go in getting either the package or any satisfaction.

So, pay attention state people:

You have from north to south the North Shore, Boston, the South Shore, Cape Cod, and the South Coast in that order and in that entirety.

The needs of the South Coast demand attention be given to them.

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The BOOMERS were there

The Boomers began arriving for the meeting open to anyone who shared the concerns. 

Although Massachusetts is a rather liberal state, it is not immune to the attempts of some to make the very Blue state very Red. On the state’s South Coast, the area from Wareham, which is actually part of Cape Cod but on the mainland side of the canal, to Rhode Island, one county recently dethroned its long-reigning white supremacist, anti-immigrant, ultra-MAGA sheriff for one that was willing to do his job as sheriff and not use the position for personal and political gain. The former sheriff is now pushing the Christian Nationalist agenda in the state by having a position of some kind with the state’s Republican Party.

We were meeting to discuss and, perhaps, begin coming up with strategies to counter and head off any attempts to ban books or pass local and state laws that might feed into the removal of rights, long held or newly recognized ones, while those doing so invoke the names of America and religion, both of which are not beneficial to all because one point of view ignores that We the People of the United States, having decided to form a more perfect Union decided to establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to all of us and our posterity came up with a Constitution, not a Bible, in which there is not one mention of God or religion beyond banning the government from establishing a state one.

Books are being banned and women’s reproductive rights are also under attack, as is dealing honestly with race, gender, and history.

When the meeting began at the announced time, the dais was assumed by the leader of the meeting who was the chair of the local Democrat Town Committee that had called the meeting and had at the least notified all Dems on the South Coast of it, a local Native American with a PHD.  

Those facing him were Boomers, mostly obviously white. The only person of color I was aware of in the room beyond the man at the dais was my Cape Verdean friend who people assume is white because of her light skin tone. 

The women in the room were of an age that they had fought for the right to choose, equal pay, breaking the glass ceiling, attempting to pass the ERA, and to a varying degree had those rights recognized so that for whatever time still remained for them to be applicable, they could enjoy them.

They are of an age now where something like the right to choose is no longer an immediate consideration in their lives as opposed a won right that they had at least had the chance to have after its being won and they want available for their progeny.

If the right to choose goes, these women have enjoyed the right for the last 50 years so actually lose little personally as it is now one they cannot exercise. They may have the satisfaction of knowing they won the battle and benefited from that win assuming future generations would benefit from their work, but they know choosing whether or not to have an abortion is just not in their futures.

It was the women who saw that none of the beneficiaries and now future losers were present.

Among the participants, no one else came forward as Gay beyond myself, and as the topic was book banning I explained my experiences twenty years ago when the object of the religio-fascists was to ban “Gay themed books” without a specific definition of the term. The book banners eventually lost and for twenty years those who fought the bans and those who came after could freely enter a library and choose a book that was “Gay themed”.

Looking around the room, those present were people who have had the opportunity to read whatever book they so choose, other than me almost, and as all of those present were Straight save one, this was not an audience for the Gay books like “All Boys Aren’t Blue”, but one that was willing to fight to keep books like that from being banned but remain available to those who would read them for pleasure or need.

For all intents and purposes the loss of women’s reproductive freedom and book banning has no influence on the lives of the people in the room as they would not be exercising what a woman’s reproductive right to choose involves and have already read a lot. In the twenty years since we fought off book banning in Oklahoma I have been able to read whatever I want while the rest in the room had never faced such a condition where they couldn’t, and as most of the Gay books being banned are age related to people 60 years younger than myself, I would most likely never read them and so would not miss them.

Old people, the majority of whom have at best 20 years of life left if they are lucky and so would not suffer any losses being promoted by the present GOP, were there to plan the best way to preserve what is being threatened while no one who would be spending the majority of their futures under this repression was there.

The people of the age where reproductive rights are essential were not there.

The Gay community and the umbrella group that serves it provided you name names was not there.

Those who should be defending the rights of minorities, for CRT, and other race related concerns were not there.

Those whose lives will be affected by decisions being made now, who may lose the rights won for them and may have to learn to adjust to life without them, perhaps fighting to get them back, need to know as any good union member can tell those who were not there that when it comes to protections, you never get back what you give back.

Indifference is giving back.

We were there to defend the rights we had won and ones we only got to enjoy for a moment.

I fought for over 40 years for Gay rights on both coasts and in the middle, the Buckle of the Bible Belt to be precise. I have seen various degrees of bigotry. In each location I gained more rights than I had in the previous, but ones I should have always had not doled out to me, and when entering Oklahoma in 1993, I had to give up what rights I had fought for and start all over. At the age of 61 I moved home to Massachusetts and for the first time I had all my rights. After all those years of fighting I got to enjoy them for 12 years so far. I got them strangely, not because I had won every rights’ battle, but because I moved to a state that respects its citizens and Gay people have equal rights, the ones the Creator gave all of us.

The advantage I have is knowing I can survive and if each right is removed in steps, I am only gradually returning to days with which I am familiar and know I can survive, although not happily. I not only did not have, had, and will no longer have my rights, but I will also have the memories of the battles and those alongside whom and against whom I fought, and then die quietly with memories of it all and not in the fit of the battle redux  that could have been avoided.

I neither do now nor will have to worry later about banned books. As an old guy I can read what I want.

I will not have to worry about the loss of Marriage equality. I am too old to consider it. Remember, I was 61 before same sex marriage was legal for me, and I may not have aged so well nor garnered the riches that would have worked for my benefit in this regard now.  

I am retired so I cannot be fired, although under the old conditions I did face that.

I can’t be denied a lot of stuff because I am a senior citizen and that alone gets me stuff.

I am more protected by the rights of the aged than I am by Gay Rights, but considering it all, it sort of evens out.

During the days of questioning, discovery, and self-acceptance, I had all my rights. I thought I was Straight and lived accordingly. So I knew what having rights, even ones taken for granted, was like. When I accepted myself and came out, I lost quite a few of them. I fought to be equal to my former self, and to a degree became so.

If the rights I fought for are taken away by degree, it will not be like throwing me into a pot of water with other younger frogs to slowly kill us by gradually increasing the water temperature until we are boiled to death as statistically I have a better chance of dying of old age before the water gets to the temp to boil me to death than the younger frogs in the pot with me who have a better chance of living long enough and suffering the whole time until boiled to death.

Their concern being in the pot should be greater than mine. I am on borrowed time with my life behind me. Their lives could have been ahead of them.

So, where were they?

Where were the young women, the members of racial minorities, the Gay community?

Why was this a room of senior citizens, Boomers, discussing and planning the preservation of rights they can not exercise at their age and not one of the age groups that will be most affected and for the longest time.

The absence was noted by the women, the Cape Verdean, and the lone Gay man.

And so, a room filled with Boomers discussed the present situation, made suggestions about realistic approaches, came up with a way to organize and respond South Coast wide to an event at a moment’s notice whether it was to a school board meeting, city hall meeting, or an incident, and how we can head this all off at the pass so those who had inherited rights would not have to live the future without them, a short future for those in attendance.

Those whose future it is were not there.

This is where I am tempted to tell the young ones to stop deflecting and claiming all the ills in their lives are because of selfish Boomers while this meeting had the attendance it did.

You actually had to drive to a location, enter a building and then a room, and talk to real people face to face with no memes or platitudes about the cosmos manifesting itself. We were not there for the “likes” or to preach comfortably through a keyboard but were in the room to accomplish something, in this case saving rights others need to have after we are gone.

Granted, the weather outside was beautiful, springlike temperatures and a slight ocean breeze cooling the warmth of the sun. But our rights do not only get attacked when the weather is lousy, and the planning that needs to be done to remove them might have to be held when it is not convenient not only when it lacks competition.

But, avoiding the Paine quote about summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, I will not do that.

I will just say plainly.

The Boomers showed up to protect the rights of the young knowing full well that what they are preparing to fight for no longer affects them but the absent young.

That’s who Boomers are.

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