I was sitting in a community meeting on the exploding gentrification of the city and what can be done to at least control it as preventing it is both impossible and suicidal for the city. I had seen gentrification happen in two previous locations and, although the city may change, the people involved might change, and the overall scheme might change, the methods and those types who use them for personal gain are the same.

The only real change is which backroom is used.

I was explaining this and reminding those present that I had traveled to all the places where I had lived in the last fifty years and I saw what had happened after I left, most of it for the better and not because of my leaving, and some places had very little of their character left and were simply cookie cutter places whose sole purpose was to make money for companies headquartered somewhere else from tourists who could see the same elsewhere.

I realized, as I was speaking, that if things were consistent, I have a good idea of what the present city will be like and that, regardless what I know will happen, and knowing it will happen to some degree in spite of what I might do, I am at the age that even as the beginning steps in the transformation are being taken, it will be years in the future before the actual work gets going full steam, and many more before it is completed, only to have the cycle begin again when what will be new will also become old and new plans and ways to profit from redoing the city are implemented..

It was clear that in this, and things like Gay Rights, I had done quite a bit to deal with this in the past because there was always the hope I would see some change, and I did in different places according to their position in the line of progress. Some had already arrived where others soon will be. However, presently, I see only a slow loss of progress due to confusing that for which we worked hard and gained with minor distractions that ensure what has been gained is going to be slowly lost.

If people paid more attention to safeguarding their rights as part of a continuum as opposed moving on to gain a new one as if gaining and protecting are not connected, young women would still have the rights their mothers had. But the right had been gained, so move along, only to panic when we see what the distraction allowed.

I am almost at the three-quarter century mark. There is very little chance I will have to live long in a future where I will continued to be denied my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness or lose what of them I had. I was 61 ears old when, as a Gay man, I go m human and civil rights. I have enjoyed hem as long as I have lived in Massachusetts for the past thirteen years, and even if I begin to lose them and return to life before I had them, I will be in my late eighties and happy just to know I opened my eyes that morning. 

I do not have to live with what is going to happen of we aren’t careful, and, although it might seem self-centered, just do no have it in me to work as hard as I used to knowing I will never see the results already having seen the results given back.

I have not only helped make lives better, but I have seen the story rewritten and some of the gains lost. What the future holds needs to be formed by those who will live in it longer than I. 

Last year at this time I was returning from a most humbling trip where my past was honored and I got to see the results of the hard work of people over the past many decades, most of whom are no longer here to see they had been correct and had done well.

This year I am using a similar trip to close it all up.

I intend to return to some past places, not like last year when I was returning to see what happened to everything, but returning to enjoy. Yes, I went to every bar on Broadway in Long Beach CA to see what happened in 30 years but now I can pick the bars I want to spend time in and enjoy the selection. The intense tourism has been done. It is time to savor the progress.

And, when I return, I will have withdrawn from all the committees, meetings, activities scheduled by others and only put in my two cents where old curmudgeons are wont to do knowing acceptance or rejection will have more effect on those to be here in the future.

As I return to no commitments, no committees, and/or no expectations, I will return totally retired other than my blog and those times I choose to take an action I feel is the correct one.