The history of New Bedford is a history of hardworking immigrants making this city at one time one of the richest per capita cities in the country, and when whaling began to die out and manufacturing called for workers, they came from every country making it a city of immigrants.

Typically, people gathered among their own for safety and community and this resulted in ethnic neighborhoods that retained much of the culture of the home countries. Even today you can choose your cuisine and bakery goods from any number of ethnic groups and know where to get it from fancy restaurants to little holes in the wall where the food is great but there are local residents not crowds.

The same holds true with culture expressed in music and art. Beyond the obvious public audio and visual celebrations, there are, like the eateries, little hole in the wall places where culture is real and not being performed or displayed in a way comfortable to the uninitiated, artificial and programmed.

Pride in origin resulted in quite a few immigrant organizations, festivals, parades, museums, art spaces, and neighborhoods with murals touting the areas greatness and community.

Having my roots in Boston, coming to the Southcoast of Massachusetts to places like Fall River or New Bedford was rare and most people I grew up with knew very little about New Bedford as anything they wanted was available in Boston.

The city went through a slump approaching death, but there were those who remained in the downtown area, and this kept what had once been a pre-mall hive of activity from becoming a plywood fronted city. Some retailers and restauranteurs held in there when all around the downtown area things were folding up.

Even as state and federal governments imposed Urban Renewal and ripped the city apart destroying history for the sake of a highway to nowhere that had a purpose but also caused structural and historical rape with a frenzy of destruction.

And people stayed, the city survived as it adapted, and the ethnic neighborhoods were anchors to the cities past greatness and, surviving as little communities within the greater one, contributed to the city’s life.

I had lived in Boston when it was relatively affordable until property speculators began to buy up property and raise rents so that the quaint neighborhoods became ones of metal and glass and older buildings are now unaffordable to the people who had kept that area of the city alive.

In Long Beach CA. after a few decades of decline and affordable housing, there was a renaissance with an overpowering gentrification which, as in many places, displaced the people already living there and keeping that area alive. I was not there for a long time, but in the years I was, I saw a city comfortable for people of average income become, because of a city plan to make the water front area a place to be, become unaffordable and people displaced because the pink walled and off-green trimmed apartment buildings took over streets with few being affordable for the people who had been living there, and low rent dumps were discovered to be desirable as was evidenced by the ballooning rents to bring the monied people into them.

During the oil bust of the 1980s that resulted in a number of foreclosed and abandoned homes throughout Oklahoma City, housing costs were low. Houses in some rather tony neighborhoods were selling for a few thousand dollars. Gay people moved into the empty homes, as so often happens in cities grasping for life, and fixed up certain areas inspiring nearby neighborhoods to do the same and the resulting revitalization of the area they saved increased taxes from what they had paid for the property to its fair market value. With insurance and other household expenses going up as the quality of the homes improved, many owners had to sell their homes.

That neighborhood is now high-end bordering on the unaffordable with huge rent increases because of the rise of the area from sketchy to classy.

Long story short, after retirement and returning to my home state, I eventually moved to an affordable apartment in New Bedford unaware that the MBTA Commuter Rail was extending it southern line to New Bedford and Fall River, and, even if I heard some news about it, not being as fully invested in a place to which I had recently moved, it might not have initially registered as it later would. The quiet, big little city was about to face gentrification and dislocation.

I attended an informational meeting about the coming of the commuter train to Boston and having lived, it seemed, any place people were about to be displaced, I had my concerns about having to  move from a place I figured I was going to spend what years I had left in to some place I had to and with which there would be no emotional attachment, a form of populated banishment.

I like it here and have become involved in the community on a variety of levels.

As I explained at that meeting, and I am sure I spoke for many, doubling my rent would make it unaffordable for me to stay but it would be a huge bargain for someone living in a similar apartment in Boston. There would be huge rent decrease leaving enough cash to buy a monthly train pass and still have the saved excess rent cost for a pleasant city life in a regrowing and changing city.

People moved to Cape Cod because it was quaint with cottages and old New England charm, only to find they missed all the other things they were used to and Hyannis became a blemish as a mall sprung up attracting what malls do as far as the metastasizing of retail sprawl, and the mainland came to the Cape destroying for the sake of the people who moved there what they had moved there for.

As they bring Boston with them, the newcomers to New Bedford will be unknowingly destroying some of what they will have moved here for while driving the city’s flavor out.                         

Property is now being bought up by out of state people who see the cash cow New Bedford will become as all Improvements in the city seem less for the sake of those already here, but for those they want to entice to come here.

In all the cities in which I had lived and that got swept up with gentrification it has been justified as making the city a Class-A city, leaving out that this is not for the benefit of the people who had been keeping a city alive and live there, but for a few politicians and businesses who see apartments as rentals and not as homes and see they will get more profits getting the residents replaced with new comers and those newcomers.

They never publicly state that it will be a Class A city for other people coming in and those who profit.

In anticipation of this migration, charter schools have been proposed so that the children of the people from Boston with high expectations and standards will not have to mingle in school with those people. The improvement of student achievement rates and graduation in the city schools have become some of the highest in the state making charter schools, which are to replace failing public ones, unnecessary. But old misinformation is hard to kill, and parents will want an alternative to the mingling.

There is usually some city-to-city migration, but this will be on a grand scale and room and accommodations must be made at the expense of the people who are keeping a city alive. The very people who kept the city from dying are the ones being displaced for those who would never have even considered moving here but now see the financial advantage as it is being presented to them with a welcome sign and a warm invite.

They can’t be blamed. I am here because it was affordable, but instead of attempting to have the city morph to my needs and expectations or hate being here, I got to become part of it and promote the city as it is. There will be changes, all cities have them. Urban evolution happens, but just as with the destruction of much of the history of the city with urban renewal ripping through it, this is an unnatural evolution that will tear the spirit out of a city that has a great one.

Yeah, I will be honest. My building was sold to an out-of-town interest and we tenants all have to move out as the building is gutted of all it historical remnants, upgraded to modernity, and reopened with rents two to three times higher than we pay right now.

One man has lived in this building for over forty years and away he goes.

The new people will have a great building as the proposed roof deck will have a commanding view of the downtown area and the harbor.

In the meantime, the people in twenty four apartments enter the competition for affordable housing with others already in or about to enter the queue heading out of the city they have grown up in or move to and became a part of.

People were so happy the train was coming only to find it was not for them.

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When I was in the process of accepting my Gay self, things were tough enough with religion and the unpredictable reactions of those who learned who I truly was, but there was the added pressure of being responsible for two things I had never thought of, a) the end of society as we know it and b) any number of natural or manmade disasters like fires, floods, earthquakes, planes flying into tall buildings, and hurricanes because Gods’ hatred of us causes Him so much anger that killing Gays was not only His aim, but the collateral damage done to everyone else, the non-Gay people, is all right because that will get a whole lot more people to hate Gays too.

When I lived in both California and Oklahoma there was always a big amusement park nearby and it did not take long to see that there were low attendance days like Superbowl Sunday and Easter, and those became unofficial Gay Days as Gays would show up on these days knowing the majority of the crowd was friendly and no one could claim their child was traumatized because two men kissed.

In spite of not being officially sanctioned, and realistically with no way to screen every person entering for their sexual orientation even if the park ownership hated who was entering, claiming it was officially sanctioned, politicians and evangelical leaders used their purposeful misrepresentations to aid in promoting their agendas. The announced punishments from God for promoting these abomination days was earthquakes, tornadoes, or hurricanes hitting the areas where those parks were because of the Gays.

And here we have Hurricane Ian hitting Florida where the only Gay related things recently have been anti-Gay actions, the Don’t Say Gay law, book purges in public and school libraries, and the laws dealing with Transgender school students.

Considering the number of documented times a punishment from God heading to Florida to get Disney, following the European as opposed American Model, suddenly turned North hitting Southern coastal areas the majority of whose populations were conservative Baptists and evangelicals.

That and the present hurricane seem to bring into question who God is actually punishing.

The other charge I and other Gays had to deal with was the claim that if we got our constitutional and Creator endowed rights, if we are allowed to enter military service or enter a same sex marriage, society as we knew would end and the United States, like the Roman empire, would be no more.

While we got many of those rights, can be thanked for our service, and have our committed relationships legally recognized, the conservative, religious right has attacked the capitol building, did what they could to interfere with the peaceful transition of power, stacked the Supreme court to take away people’s rights, especially those of women, have adopted many of the attitudes and practices of fascism, and seem more bent on destroying the country as we know it than Gay people are or ever were.

We just want to live in peace and equality.

I find these ironies amusing.

God seems rather angry now and, as He often did in the past, is once again sending a message to those who claim they are the Christians while they do everything that goes against the teachings thereof.

And certainly, they are not going to claim that God was so angry with Key West He sent a hurricane to hit the whole state.

We shall see.

Or will DeSantis get the message?

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For most post-middle school teachers who are the first to face the cute 6^th graders who had become the poorly established rebels with undefined principles for their rebelling during middle school that resulted from the effects of puberty in progress, the first class on the first day, or any number of first classes on the first day, a teacher enters a room full of strangers all with their own different quirks and world views, coming from families of varying degrees of success at being successful families with whom they will be gathered every day for at least 45 minutes for 180 days in one room.  

Besides the usual getting to know the students and presenting enough about themselves to their students to begin building rapport, teachers also face each student’s presenting themselves as they want to be accepted and these go from the most obvious brown-nose to the rebel without a clue who opposes everything on principle.

There is usually one such student in each class who wants to be the established rebel and the introduction of this begins with the teacher simply going over class rules and expectations.

I have taught in a few places on both coasts and in the middle of the country and the rebellious first day questions regardless where asked were generally similar with a lot if “What if we do…” or “What if we don’t do it?” questions often presented as a challenge, a measure of limits. While some questions may be for simple procedural clarifications, there are those who make it clear which rules or procedures they do not agree with and will oppose.  

As an English teacher who would have to read essays, one of my rules was that all final copies of their essays must be written in blue or black ink. The reasons as explained to the students was because pencils get dull and the writing becomes hard to read, sweat can smudge the pencil work,  blue and black ink are more professional than using cute colored pens that match the writer’s mood, red makes it look corrected and appears as a preliminary report and not the final, and job applications called for blue and black ink and the students might as well get used to following that direction without rebelling when such is required.

Needless to say, there were students who rebelled in favor of personal pen choice and, sadly, parents who backed them, and this was actually just a part of a bigger problem.

That may have been my initial battle often, but a more universal teacher experience involved the daily Pledge of Allegiance.

It doesn’t take long for older students to see that, as foolish and meaningless as it is, the daily recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, because of Facebook memes and politicians demanding it be recited in schools even as it is said every day in school makes it an issue with which the rebel can establish a cause

The demand is totally fictitious and proven to be so by anyone who is in a school building during Homeroom.

Without fail, for 38 years, sometimes up to six classes per day on the first day, the common issue brought up was standing for the pledge. If the teachers were to demand everyone stand there would be objections from those who claimed, “I have rights!” and “You can’t make me.” If the teacher stated they didn‘t have to, the story would be brought home and a parent would demand action be taken against the unpatriotic teacher.

I addressed this conundrum be explaining the purpose of the Pledge while acknowledging that there may be those who for religious or political reasons cannot swear an oath, Quakers come to mind, or just do not see value in the practice. My advice was always that it would be nice if everyone stood and recited the pledge as it would look good to anyone passing by, but since that is not the purpose of the act, if for deeply held beliefs a student could not or would not recite the pledge, for the sake of the visual it would be nice if everyone stood while those who could not or would not recite the pledge stood silently sans hand on chest. If this was too much, they could choose to sit quietly doing nothing that would distract from the recital as there is a difference between civil disobedience done quietly and making a scene and becoming the center of attention. The students would then be advised that their choice to stand or sit quietly would most likely be accompanied by questions and possible condemnation, so it would be on them to defend their action and explain their rationale. It was their choice, but it would also be their responsibility to explain themselves.

Their choice could be defended but any distracting or disruptive behavior would have to be “punished” because of the difference between not reciting and causing a competing scene.

In 38 years, there was never an issue, and I can only recall one student who decided to counter the Pledge with noise and this resulted in his being disciplined not for refusing to say the Pledge but for bringing attention to himself in order t disrupt a relatively harmless and largely meaningless recitation of a poem.

And for those 38 years even as I stood modeling Pledge behavior and reciting the pledge, after “Liberty and justice for all”, I would mumble the word, “Whenever”.

Students never knew, but I did.

Rebellion without disruption.

Students at public schools and universities have the right to express “symbolic speech” by sitting during the Pledge of Allegiance or National Anthem. Florida among other states requires K-12 students have parental permission to forgo standing during the pledge.

So, they know that there is an option.

There was an issue recently in a Florida school when a teacher went after a Latino student who had not stood for the Pledge using racist rhetoric in the process.

In the present battle to prove who is more patriotic and to combat alleged indoctrination, in places where uber-patriotism is the goal and all policies and curricula are geared to produce one image of the United States, there is pressure to conform and prove loyalty to the culture or be out on the streets.

 Sadly, in many politically run school districts teachers are pressured to act certain ways and prove they are worthy of keeping their jobs, or are hired because they will promote the political, religious, and personal beliefs of the person doing the hiring.

So, although I am horrified at the teacher’s reaction, there is a part of me that wonders if the teacher’s motivation was to appear acceptable to the powers that be, an undue artificial requirement to teach, or acted as he did because he was the person hired because of a political agenda.

The story contains two of Florida’s presently most obvious traits, uber-jingoistic patriotism and racism.

A student did not stand for the pledge but sat quietly. The teacher approached the student and opened with,

“You are gonna sit there on your butt?  If you want to do something, just get up and do it. I will defend my country to the very end.”

The teacher was taunting the student to leave the realm of civil disobedience and get involved in a punishable physical altercation which the teacher implied was the student’s intention.

After the student explained that he had no intention to hurt the teacher nor did he want to get up and do something, full-Florida set in.

“Then go back to your … where are you from? Mexico or Guatemala? Where?”

“I was born here,” the student replied. 

“You were born here? And you won’t stand up for the flag?”

The uber-patriotism flew in the face of the law and Constitution, but in certain places like Florida reason is lost to a bizarre form of nationalism.

The teacher has been removed from the classroom for the moment and no longer has any contact with students.

For its part the district explained,

“The School District of Manatee County strongly condemns any language or behavior that degrades, humiliates or insults any individuals — most especially the young people, families and community we have the privilege of serving,” 

Sadly, in this case, there was a teacher who confused his need to prove his patriotism more so to himself than others and felt justified in basing his reaction to a legal action on racism, nationalism, and politics and in so doing violated the law by first berating the student for the exercise of an established right and then acting on the assumption that the parental opt-out was not signed or could be easily ignored.

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Most people who have gone through schools in the United States have a skewed view of the Underground RailRoad which was neither a railroad nor underground. As effective as it may have been, it was a long walk from the slave states close to the Mason Dixon line that took constant vigilance watching for those hoping to cash in on a bounty, and faith in the people you were supposed to meet up ahead. It was also limited in coverage as the longer the journey the less likely the success, and failure meant being sent further down south where the OGRR did not have tracks.

We have all the stories about the secret meanings of Negro Spirituals, are familiar with Harriet Tubman even if it is to protest her replacing Andrew Jackson on the twenty, and a lot of movies with uplifting endings.

The Underground RailRoad we were taught about took place close to the North/South Border and went straight up to Canada by way of the inland states.

To affect an escape, there had to be a chain of people to give the correct signal at the right time, people arranged along the way to supply the travelers’ needs, and ways to guard against the possibility that bounty hunters will be able to track you down. It was a system under the control of a lot of people but not the person ready to leave. He or she had to wait for others to start their future.

After days of traveling, an escape to the free states did not mean you were free as you could easily be followed and brought back most likely to be sold deeper south.

The part of the Underground Rail Road that is overlooked is the most obvious. Just looking at a map, it is clear that from Maryland, around Florida to the Gulf of Mexico there are thousands of miles of seacoast and in places like the Chesapeake Bay, with all its inlets and smaller bays, even more coastline where colonies, then states, built seaports to which what was produced inland was brought to be shipped all over the globe. This system brought agrarian slaves into cities and smaller towns on rivers and estuaries where they could mingle with other Blacks, slave and free, and learn about places and things so far removed from the plantations.

Seaports needed people to fix and repair ships, fit ships out for voyages, and load and offload them. Whole cities were based on the ports with the majority of businesses having some connection to the docks.

There was plenty of hard work to be done related to shipping, and in the South that work was done by slaves who were not only learning a trade, but networking to find a way out and who would then take those trades and get employment when they got to a sanctuary city, like Frederick Douglass did.

Slaves knew schedules of ships, who was policing where on a regular basis, who the sympathetic captains might be, or the ones who would be less likely to find a stowaway. They also knew every inch of every ship they worked on in port and, so, knew the best places to hide.

And as they became familiar to the other workers and some of the sailors who came to port regularly as part of a regular run, they found allies who would aid and cover for them.

It was an action that required intelligence to get to the point that a disappearance would not be immediately known and often was, after the ship had sailed and was out to sea.

The three days from the most Southern port on the East Coast to the first Northern and, therefore, safe port was a lot shorter than an overland trip, and, unless they had come up with a fast boat, bounty hunters would not be following.

Riding the winds and currents made turning back to turn in a stowaway out of the question, so the completion of the trip was guaranteed, what happened after reaching port was not.

For bounty hunters to bring you back it would mean a long trip up North dealing with abolitionists when they got to the city to which they assumed the self-emancipated person had gone and putting up with purposeful misdirection and other machinations to keep bounty hunters away from the new Northern residents, followed by a long trip back with the fugitive and the possibility of another escape and either going on another chase or return empty-handed and not get paid.

There are many examples of maritime emancipations, the ships that took people North, and the captains who made the escapes possible, or who, upon finding they had a stowaway on board, handled it so they both followed and violated the law so they were covered and the slave now free.

For those with an interest in the Underground Rail Road, the Maritime version is worth looking into. Maritime emancipation dispels the old notion of slaves not being all that intelligent when the facts of these emancipations showed how intelligent and clever these people, men and women, and in some cases children, were to have learned the system and played it well.

Mitch McConnell, like him or not, is the main person in the GOP right now and has spent the past few years controlling the congress and the laws it passes and the judges it appoints. He was good at what he did, and not caring what his opposition thought, pushed his and the GOP agenda along.

However, we seem to have been wrong in assuming that, although they would never admit it out loud, the Republican Party, now a mere shadow of its former self its spaces being filled mainly with conspiracy theories and fascist policies and actions, would continue disguising itself as the party that cares for the people and is the defender of what it means to be America.

Marjories Taylor Greene pulled the curtain back and revealed the true spirit of the GOP as she explained on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” why she wanted one candidate in Arizona to win and her disapproval of McConnell’s apparent reluctance to actively support a far-right candidate.

She justified the need for McConnell to go by saying after first characterizing the GOP as the good guys saying,

“Everyone knows this nation is, we’re about to have a complete revival. Because Americans know who our identity is. We are a Christian nation, we are a country of nationalism, we care about our borders, we care about our economy, we care about our children,”

that she had a message for Arizona,

“Mitch McConnell is pulling his support and pulling money from backing Blake Masters for Senate, and he’s doing that because Blake Masters is not the type of senator Mitch McConnell wants in Washington. But Arizona has an opportunity that only they can pull off. If they elect Blake Masters and send him to the Senate here in Washington, D.C., they are going to be cutting the head off the snake and defeating Mitch McConnell, the RINO that has controlled the Senate for years now. This is the message that needs to be sent to Washington, Steve.”

Although it is obvious that her intention might have been to insult McConnell, in so doing she revealed that he was, in reality, the head of the party in Congress and the party is a snake.

It would seem that Trump had revealed a secret about the GOP that we did not see, and Marjorie has done us the favor of reminding us of how Trump described the party when he recited his Snake Poem.

“Oh shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin,. “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”

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Although it may have appeared a little odd at the time to most people, the aftermath of the 2020 elections that produced the convenience of claiming voting irregularities had made election results questionable does go a long way in explaining why the Sheriff of Bristol County, Massachusetts, who had pledged county Jail inmates to help build Trump’s wall and secretly reported his parish church for making information available to immigrants, which is a very Christain thing to do, demanded he and his deputiess be allowed to patrol voting places without a shred of evidence that local law enforcement entrusted with that job were not up to the task nor was there any evidence he could use to claim that.

He needed to be at the polls to cause what could be seen as questionable activities that could call the votes into question, or, and this would not be outside the realm of his possibilities, fabricate a problem claiming he had personally witnessed whatever it was he invented.

He used this tactic when defending himself after the May 1, 2020, riot at his ICE detention center where his claims as the truth teller that it was the inmates who had done wrong were proven to be woven excuses for his own incompetence and bigotry.

He was stopped. He his Supreme Leader leader down because of all the counties in state, Bristol should have been the perfect pawn.

In 2022 there is more at stake than his just catching the eye of Orange-Jesus. Thomas Hodgson is up for reelection and his loss could affect whatever promises he has made to those, the local less than trustworthy shadow people, who have been benefitting from his being the sheriff and the white nationalist groups he has aided from his position of sheriff.

Local law enforcement, regardless of opinions in other areas, have been consistently effective when it comes to securing polls, and to ignore this to justify additional actions, whether directly or through transparent surrogates, is suspect at best, especially as the person in a position to push the intrusion at the polls is a candidate himself.

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