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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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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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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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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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