Looking around a city whose leadership wants to be the ones who took a city on life support and made it a Class-A city without seeming to have an actual plan grabbing for whatever bauble is put before them as the answer to what will put the Lucem back in Lucem Diffundo, and are, therefore, ripe for accepting that, for the price of a city, they can all be Nigerian Princes.
The problem is the plans they have come up with so far, a casino, an aquarium, some other thongs that fell through, so the desperation to have something to show has to come about ee if that meansthose people liveing here are o be ignored and removed, their ideas of what ould make to city better being ignored iperferring what consultants have created in iter places sometime with he eventual reaction of a city odelled after dying malls that at one point were the answers for evry problem at the time.
New Bedford, once great, could build on and add to its historical importance but, A small group of property owners have partnered with an out of state consulting firm to form a Business Improvement District, an area within which property owners pay an additional tax or fee in order to fund services and improvements within that district’s boundaries. It might sound attractive that property and safety will be improved, but the actual property owners could be anyone anywhere who might only be interested in their investment in things they will never see just for the dividends, not the local small business owners, artists, or residents who would enhance and improve areas that are part of the city, not completely remove what is there that makes the area special.
Imagine if the people in the South End around the Orpheum had been consulted, not ignored, by the state and federal out of town and out of state people who left us with such other great improvements to the fill quality of live like the Central Artery but could have left water Street a functioning mercantile area.
Although it might start as a small area with its own flavor with the history of the secrecy around who is buying property and unhousing the locals to make room for people not guaranteed to come, most assuredly the planners will not stop when one, what should be called a “phase” from the get-go is completed and put an abutting area to same and the obvious contrast demanding some work. We already had the secret planning of the State Pier supposedly for the benefit of the city designed by a group of the “usual businessmen” which was only announced after the fact apparently assuming it would be accepted as a done deal until it actually wasn’t by a city with people in it who want to and should be allowed to improve their city. An unknown business incestuous group of businessmen had decided for the city what the pier would look like and the businesses and ambience, the whole look, the theme, if you will would fit with one planners restaurant plan fitting in just nicely. The need for imitation would in all likelihood spread the plan, design, and determine property usage throughout the city so, instead of being one with character, the city becomes yet another product of the cookie cutter approach that has too many seaside cities looking the same with mostly shiny class hotels, casinos, and other activities for those from elsewhere with their needs met by he underpaid locals who render the required services.
Such zones gain control over the development of properties, the management of branding, setting a district’s and, eventually, the city’s identity, and the overall marketing of downtown.
How long before the consultants come in and do to New Bedford what they did for Salem when all the outside companies came in to make money, downplayed the horrors of the actual Witch Trials, and trivialized it all with a statue of Samantha Stevens of Bewitched in a prominent location and not Giles Cory.
Following the former sheriff of Bristol County MA announcing at his inauguration after yet another reelection, “I’m making a formal offer to President-elect Trump, that inmates from Bristol County and from across the nation, through Project N.I.C.E., will help build that wall, people saw a need to have this man removed from office and in the process Bristol County for Correctional Justice, a grassroots community committee that began looking closely at the sheriff and his performance. In Massachusetts, the sheriff’s job is a custodial one whose department runs the county jails and makes sure inmates held in detention get to and from court on their appointed day and any long term and seriously sentenced ones get to their proper facility.
This sheriff was more interested in enhancing his own image to get the attention of the Trump administration in the attempt, one can imagine, to get some position in the administration.
BCCJ, and eventually media outlets based on its findings found the following actions among those of the former sheriff:
Volunteered inmates to help build Trump’s wall to impress the president and enhance his image.
Ignored COVID protocols while claiming all was under control. It wasn’t.
Justified wearing a confederate tie in his official portrait because it had Red, White, and Blue on it.
Fomented a riot at the ICE Detention Center during which he used excessive force.
Lost the ICE Detention Center contract because of human rights violations.
Consistently had more suicides annually than any other jail in the state.
Had the second highest recidivism rate in spite of claims people are too scared to come back because of his toughness.
Reported his parish church to the White House for caring for immigrants.
Questionably used state and county tax dollars.
Spoke at many white supremacists events with travel paid by county taxpayers.
Referred to immigrants as “criminal Illegal Aliens” so he could pretend to be protecting the county from them while actually doing nothing.
Continually tried to find ways of creating a slush fund from created inmate fees.
Detained immigrants when there was no legal basis to do so.
Went to the country’s largest Portuguese festival and drank Medeira Wine whie wearing a sidearm,
Had the Supreme Judicial Court rule that he could not charge prisoners any fees that are unauthorized by law.
Had the attorney costs for all his losing lawsuits running into the millions paid for by the taxpayers.
Had the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice and Latham and Watkins LLP file a suit to hold him accountable for the illegal detention of immigrants.
Was on the Board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform promoting anti-
immigrant rhetoric.
Got sued for unconstitutional solitary confinement of the mentally ill
Left an inmate in solitary confinement the day after the inmate had told a court doctor that he was going to commit suicide, which he then did by hanging himself.
Joined the anti-government Constitutional Sheriffs Association in 2013, a group of sheriffs who believe they should only have to uphold those laws that they agree with, not all laws that exist.
You get the point, and this is a short list.
In his tenure as sheriff, this man took some pretty bad and politically based actions, many based on bigotry, much based on dehumanizing people below his station.
During most of this, his actions were explained away by his spokesman, Jonathan Darling, who, as anyone who followed up on his explanations, clearly saw, he engaged in a lot of cover up, distraction, and outright misrepresentation of the facts, such as the time it was claimed that the video of the Detention Center riot would clearly show it was all on the inmates but when finally shown to the public presented otherwise, but Bristol County for Correctional justice was consistent in making known the falsehoods being laid on the people of the county.
Evidence of the ineffective tactic of presenting lies as truth, just the very thought of such a tactic being an insult to citizens of a county assumed to be easily fooled, can be seen as, when he was riding the coattails of Trump, the people of the county finally rejected him because of all of this and replaced him with a sheriff who is being a sheriff and not a derriere dazzled, self-promoting sycophant.
And now this.
The University of Massachusetts (UMass) College of Visual and Performing Arts left its campus nine months ago after the students there were given just a few week’s notice that the Star Store in which it had been house would close and a new space sought.
This not only left the students in the lurch, but it put a huge hole in what was as city coming back. Students needed housing and necessities, places to unwind with friends who might come to visit from out of town, increasing foot traffic and promoting local businesses.
However, even though it could have been had by the university of a dollar, even cheaper now than the lowest priced item in Dollar Tree, they waited past the deadline so the building went to the person who kinda-sorta owns it now.
In this battle which would appear to be over as there is nothing being done to reopen the
downtown campus, the university looks like an uncaring Grinch trying hard to create an image as a rural university in a bucolic setting and a mayor who has a big empty building in his city which is rather embarrassing as no one in the city government seemed to be paying attention as the deadline for either buying the building for a buck or let it go was looming. Attention was obvious elsewhere, and I would posit on something more immediately more lucrative personally by way of real and commercial use with profits going somewhere and to somebody.
The mayor is now facing this problem in addition to the already existing and ongoing ones.
Whether his excuses are real or cover-ups, what the mayor needs is credibility and one would think if he were to hire a spokesperson, it would be one whose truthfulness will need to be accepted by a rightfully judgmental citizenry.
The mayor, in spite of nothing offered to support the contention beyond he is working on it, insists he will find a way to save the day while, it is obvious, also saving and/or improving his reputation is also involved.
According to a local reporter, when asked about UMass ever returning the Campus of Visual and Performing Arts to the Star Store in downtown New Bedford, the mayor’s spokesman sent him a one-sentence statement, “discussions are ongoing”, and that at this time the mayor has nothing new to share.
So, without saying anything, the mayor’s spokesperson and the mayor are giving us a Shrodinger situation where something is or is not being done, and the only proffered non-information has come from a mayor and the former spokesman for the disgraced sheriff who we are to believe is being honest here.
This reporter has written, “Getting straightforward information out of the Mitchell administration these days seems an impossibility on any number of subjects.”
Could this lack of straight forward information be due to who the spokesperson with a track record that lacks truthfulness is.
The mayor hired a person, whose lies have been exposed for his attempts to make excuses for one elected official to cover up missteps he hoped no one saw. We, the people, are supposed to just lap up whatever Sarah Huckabee Darling throws at us when we have seen this person rarely speak the truth.
The city has its problems as a once vibrant economy that has evaporated as industries moved elsewhere and things like a casino and aquarium did not pay off. Improvement is needed as is faith in the words of those in charge of it who need to rely on support from the very people they seem so willing to lie to and hired a expert with proven experience experience in that.
Why would the city hire a Bernie Madoff as the person to assure the people of the city that the finances are good.
In light of his past lack of veracity and the man’s evasive answers he gave to the simplest question regarding his old boss, the former sheriff, are we being told something when in answering a reporters question, he wrote, “Please attribute this statement to me as spokesperson for the City.”
Is he going to be spreading false information no only in the name of the mayor, but the city as a whole?
With all its post-industrial problems like unemployment, low wages, a housing crisis, as a city’s renaissance usually involved displacing the Great Unwashed already in a location to be replaced by people with more money, major changes and all that comes with gentrification could erase the spirit and culture of a city, and the mayor chooses as his spokesperson a known fabricator of record to soften any difficulties.
How is the city and its people going to be assured all is well and things are getting brighter when we are being spoken to by Sarah Huckabee Darling minus the slipcover patterned house dress with a record of lying.
The mayor could have been less insulting to the citizenry.
By now it is common knowledge that Kristie Noem shot her unruly 14 month old dog rather than find it another home. Her explanation for no longer wanting the dog was reasonable as shelters and the yards of friends whose hearts are too big are filled with dogs no longer wanted. It was a safety issue with no options to address it because at,
“At the time, I had small children, a lot of small kiddos that worked around our business and people, and I wanted to make sure that they were safe. I hated that dog.”
Her hatred was understandable. Since you pick the dog and there is a fifty/fifty chance to picked a good future dog or an albatross that will be hung around you neck for the next 15 years barring an accident, you cannot curse what nature laid on you but must bear some guilt-laden regret about how your choice ended up while, perhaps, seeing what could have been the one you chose serving your neighbor as yours will never do you.
That’s gotta hurt.
But, beyond thinking it was somehow a good move to record forever that this hatred led her to shoot Cricket, her dog- not Rex, or Killer, but Cricket- in a gravel pit while her daughter sat in the truck and watched her walk away and, after a bang, return without the dog and then, apparently finding it a good place for executions, came back with a goat and after shooting it twice with a shot gun went to her truck, daughterless this time, to get additional shells as the first two shots did not finish off the goat that waited in pain while she made the round trip to get the ammo to do it.
When people reacted to this, especially as she could have given the dog away, Noem attempted to soften the degree of her cruelty, in part attempting to get on lookers to the story to lessen their anger by accepting some degree of guilt for over reacting, by pointing out that, while the public has made it seem worse that it actually was by using the word “puppy” it was a “working dog” and was 14 months old, apparently having gone beyond the official length of puppy-hood during which time she could have reduced Crickets unruliness with training.
So, had it been an official puppy, people would be justified in their horror, but it was a dog already at the time, so it’s not as bad. In light of her original excuse, “At the time, I had small children, a lot of small kiddos that worked around our business”, those kiddos may need to assess their situation as they approach puberty.
As we head into pride month and corporations start slapping rainbows on things to get those dazzled by shiny objects to buy them, which they will do, I think it important to learn some of what makes us proud, well, me anyway.
I will be doing the Amtrak Rail Pass trip again this year. Having gotten to revisit locations from my past, the milestones along the way, while meeting certain obligations and having seen how the whole thing works, warts and all by way of delays due to tornadoes on the plains, cancellations, and having to spend a night with other passengers as equally unaware that Amtrak stations close from midnight to 7:00 a.m. creating small encampments of people and their luggage, this time there will be less travel induced angst.
It will begin at Pride In Oklahoma City. I need for me to be at this one.
The festivities there and what may come after is still open and uncertain in a good way, but there will be an abundance of on board the train time and little for art. As a build up to Pride, I will run a few blogs that would be better timed for Pride Month, but may need to be done now if at all.
I have said it before. The road to equality is not made of segmented compartments that arise in sequence, one after another, and, as each right is won, gets filed away on a shelf as completed so we can move into the next room remembering to close the door to the old room behind us. It involves a series of overlapping steps whose importance remains even as their goal is reached because what was instrumental in getting one right continues to contain what is useful for future progress.
Some forty years ago, having been inspired by the failed Briggs Amendment in California, bigotry being a bandwagon upon which the state would jump while itself not initiating it, Oklahoma passed a state law that would forbid teachers from teaching in public schools and remove any found to be already in the classroom. Gays were considered to belong to a unique, extra-legal category of “nonadjudicated felons” which did not require Gays to do anything to be subjected to all the negatives of being a convicted felon, no job, home, no respect. We just had to admit we were Gay, or were found to be Gay somehow, and that was the basis of the status. It was not what we did, sexual acts not being committed by a Gay virgin, but by simply stating who we were Gay.
The law was found to be unconstitutional as a person without committing an illegal act cannot be declared a felon for life. An illegal act has to be committed with adjudication not a simple declaration. Just as it would need a Heterosexual teacher to be involved in some sort of sexual activity around students or within sight of any student or students and not just be Heterosexual or have thoughts about and toward the opposite sex as the basis of dismissal, the same should be true of Gay teachers.
And so, starting 1985, because of a court case that went up to the state supreme court, Gay teachers could not be fired for being Gay, but could be fired for inappropriate behavior in the presence of students just like Heterosexual ones.
Sadly, for the next 13-14 years, Gay teachers continued to remain in the closet for fear of being fired while a lawyer named Bill, who had been the lawyer fighting and winning against the anti-Gay Teacher law, knowing they could not be fired unless they committed a legally offensive act, had to watch teachers acting like they were still oppressed without options.
Discovery may have become less of a threat, but it still kept teachers and administrators in the closet only to be known for who they truly were by the few who heard things through the grapevine or being that close a friend where a confidence is respected, and their hiding perpetuated the idea that there was a reason being Gay, even with freedom, was kept secret.
In 1998, according to a deputy superintendent, up to 25% of the school district administrators were known to be Gay or Lesbian but were acceptable because of their complicity in this silence and were themselves comfortable in the convenient belief that the open secret was a sealed one. They could keep their jobs while continuing to be controlled by those who obviously disrespected them as people while accepting their work as administrators. They voluntarily sat under the Sword of Damocles while enjoying a possibly fleeting dinner party.
Not long after a meeting in which the Deputy Superintendent realized that the safety and wellbeing of all students meant extending the same toward Gay students, and that, just as with other groups of students, their issues were student ones not political ones, they were students not political platforms, as I passed by his office in the administration building one day, he called me back and, much in the way it is done in Film Noir, with the accompanying demand that while the contents of the envelope may be referred to broadly but not in detail, the source must be kept secret and the actual contents not shown, he handed me a manilla envelope containing all the relevant papers related to the 1985 case, and some other papers based on recent Supreme Court cases that bolstered the case for the Gay kids.
When it should have been a useful tool, the 1985 ruling seemed to have had no influence until, after referencing the court case in generic terms a few times, we had arrived at a point where directly citing the court case and related papers was called for and unavoidable, and it was revealed that those advocating for Gay students were more informed than the administration had believed and the demands made which they attempted to brush off actually were based on Bill’s case that we brought to them out of the blue and which deflated many of their excuses for inaction.
Sadly as he aged, Bill began to develop dementia, becoming a very frustrated curmudgeon of whom the young know little. He did not live long enough to see his court case would actually bear fruit after the twelve years of advocacy based on the court case that had been decided 24 years prior.
The Deputy Superintendent left the district and became a superintendent in a district in another state. It is noted in his recent obituary that he promoted diversity, no doubt influenced by meetings and old court cases like the one he slipped me in the unmarked manilla envelope.
In the end, it wasn’t morality that had the school district act correctly.
Throughout the years of advocacy the school board had been given a simple choice, protect the Gay students as it was truly their obligation to do as all students have to be in school a certain number of days by law or legal action could be taken against the student or parent and not being safe at school could influence attendance which would adversely affect state funding based on attendance, or face an angry parent in court suing the district for negligence its having lost any claim of not being aware of the problem as we spoke in public to the board at its meeting for a number of years explaining the possibility of litigation.
Do it for the right reason, all students must be protected, or be prepared to face litigation without a plea of innocence as they had also been warned in the media, and if they choose not to cover the students, it was their collective derriere that would need coverage.
Where people saw me doing the unthinkable by putting myself out there, I did so knowing I had legal back up.
Finally, the head of the Board and a prominent local lawyer who was a little too intense in his refusal to protect Gay students seeing the passage of the Matthew Shepherd act, realized we had not been lying and now there was proof that the consequences of abandoning the Gay students would indeed bring about indefensible litigation. That would explain why, after 12 years of objecting to inclusion based on politics and religion, on December 14, 2009, after all school board members seemed to have simultaneously come across all sorts of studies, legal opinions, and case law over the previous weekend after having ignored the same for 12 years and were clearly holding the envelopes each had received over the years, one marks one’s envelopes like a poker player marks cards and the marked envelopes were held by each member who made the discovery, it was decided to add sexual orientation and Gender Identity as an emergency action which eliminated the required first and second readings of a proposed policy and voting in our original proposal about Gay Students at that meeting.
It was not a single, straight line from proposal to completion but one that surrounded time and people over years and through progressing steps sometimes going back to move forward.
Not only did the process bring about the results, but it also showed how the newly won protections could be preserved with no better example coming from the district itself that, after eight trouble free years devoid of any of the predicted fire and brimstone such inclusion would unleash, the district added Gender Expression, something they would not have done if the predicted problems with inclusion had actually happened.
Although it originally fought inclusion and did not embrace it, over time the district matured.
For the twelve years during which further protections were recognized, there had been no problem, making the Oklahoma City Schools District the case study that showed inclusion caused no harm and Trans students did not ruin sports. The people and papers needed to defend the protections existed in the city with some people aging out, but when after 12 years the rights of the Trans students came under attack, those who had won the protections were supplanted by national and state organizations whose position implied they were the experts but who, in spite of their previous attempts to get Trans students rights for those who didn’t have them and protect those of the ones who did, had failed consistently.
When you had success in a certain area, what brought about that success should be remembered and sought. In this, the approach was to bring in theory and present studies done elsewhere that include a lot of point/counterpoint, boiler plates being tossed around. But what was ignored was the actual case study that existed at the time and could be used as a source of measurable fact and not theories and memes.
History was ignored and the students lost.
The rights were won for future students by people who would never experience school without harassment and discrimination as most were either close to or over fifty. They guarded their papers which the big named organizations had no use for, preferring the traditional failing approaches.
When Bill won, the win was not filed away. It may have taken some time, but the win of 1985 eventually became useful in the next step which began in 1997. A straight teacher, concerned about the death of a student and the bullying that preceded it and who, while being allowed to offer the student’s peers consolation that would be Christan in nature, would not be allowed to console those close peers who were not mainstream, went to a Gay teacher asking how this could be right. It came to include the teachers’ Union. A teacher was wrongfully dismissed for the pro-Gay student advocacy and won his job back in court in 2009. The plan to remove the messenger and, thus, kill or at least shelve the message, had failed leaving the teacher to continue. A win in the appellate court solidified the win. So there he still was. The court of public opinion had shifted just enough so that this whole court story, while being rather embarrassing for the district, also showed the rightness of protecting the Gay students and the weakness of opposition. Having lost the very public case the district had to find a way to do the right thing without losing face.
They had hoisted themselves on their own petards.
Then in October, 2009, President Barack Obama gave the Oklahoma City School Board the out it needed when he signed the “Matthew Shepherd and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act” which added crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability to the list of hate crimes. The District saw that the Gay Community had been right all those years since most documents submitted to the district, if not all, related to “Sexual Orientation” had included the words “real or perceived” after them.
Congress had spoken, so, regardless what anyone’s personal feeling might be one way or the other, this was something the school district could say they had been forced to do and to comply with or lose federal funds and avoid the wrath of those opposed to the additional language while to some they could be seen as their just being good people. In the end, they went with protecting themselves by adopting the added language from the bill and the students got the protections they should have always had.
If you look at the totality of the events, they involved a bunch of loosely connected people, mostly Boomers and War Babies, who brought their life experiences as Gay people worming through the decades and bringing forward what they learned, adding that onto, not next to, what needed to get done spanning 25 years of reliance on knowing who did what before and adding what worked to what was being done to get things done. From the Court case through the attainment of student protection, history played a role as events were pulled forward not recreated.
Bill was a War Baby, I a Boomer, but we worked together, even if apart in time and place, because we knew history and may have shared some, albeit similar but in a different place, and it benefited people we would never know, and we knew where to go to get the needed history.
The won rights were lost when, instead of looking at the local history, it was replaced with modern boilerplates created elsewhere and not rising organically from those with the roots.
They could have been retained if history was not ignored in favor of texts and clever memes.
