Quite a few losses over the past few years. Charlie, of course. Nancy M, Nancy S, Paul S, Skip K, and now GJ seems very imperiled. Seems like only yesterday we were all getting together for meetings or parties or leafleting or signing up voters at the county fair or the OB fair, or doing midnight door hangings, getting chased by dogs around unfamiliar neighborhoods.
It'll be 50 years this November since the assassination of Kennedy. 53 years since he was elected and Nancy & Nancy were young women then, eagerly walking precincts getting out the vote for him in 1960. I guess the Pt. Loma club still has some energy but amazingly enough it looks like the SDDC is foundering. The banquet has become an afternoon snack, I don't think the club has the clout it did when it was a king maker, when candidates thronged for endorsements. Maybe now, too, but not as much. No more mailer work parties, its on line now. More efficient of course but getting the membership together to physically do something for the cause, the stories, the socializing, the bonding, made a lot of difference, it kind of made the club. Now it isn't even named the SDDC any more, its SD Democrats for Equality. Fine. The idea was to bring in the younger voters. Has it? Seemingly not though I could be wrong.
In reading Charlie's journals I am struck by how active he was, and he wasn't the only one. I guess in a way the movement has achieved so many of its goals gay people might not see the necessity of being political now. As gay people we were continually under attack, held up as enemies of the state, of morality, of God, by Republican politicians, even some Democrats. Our rights were continually under attack, being eroded, being extinguished. As Charlie said it was a matter of survival to organize and fight back. And now that so many goals have been achieved I guess it just doesn't seem important to people any more. I wonder if they are right. I wonder if our position is secure or if it can all be swept away in some kind of Christian Republican Revival. For sure a Republican gov and or legislature could trip us up badly. But for now I guess people are just relaxing, enjoying the complacency.
I am old enough I realize I won't be here when the shit hits the fan. Not so much on gay rights as on say the country's economy, the building of barriers to class and economic mobility, the privatization & expensivization of higher education. The middle class has been cast into unmitigatable debt, the infrastructure, the whole system is being allowed to collapse just to cut taxes for the already super rich, the formula for national collapse. Too bad. We tried. Hard. Its too far gone now. Oh I suppose some radical congress & pres could just cancel all the student debt but thats not going to happen, congress is gerrymandered and the big money will forever control it. Thus, the collapse is inevitable. It is too bad. And I am not going to be around to see it, thankfully. Ultimately the responsibility is on the middle class for ever having voted against its own interests, against its own existence, by putting into office Nixon, Reagan, and the Bush boys. They should have known better. But Republican appeals to racism or to glamorous empty suits (Reagan) worked, it conned them. Oh well. Nothing lasts forever.
