Tag: Nixon

Posted on

Resist, by Pat Gourley

In one of my recent
meanderings through Facebook, which sadly has become something I do multiple
times a day, I happened on the following little ditty posted and credited to a
web site named sun-gazing.com:
“I’m too old for
this shit
I’m too tired for
this shit
I’m too sober for
this shit
I don’t have time
for this shit”
sun-gazing.com
My initial reaction was
that this was a funny and perhaps poignant statement from someone on the current
state of America and the seemingly endless political nightmare we find
ourselves in. Something though slowly began to bother me, especially the last
line: “I don’t have time for this shit”. 
I decided to check the web site and clicked on their “About Us” page,
where right at the top was the following sentence:  “The Sun Gazing Community was born out of a growing awareness that
suffering is an optional state of being”.
Let me go on record
calling “bullshit” on this unexamined bromide and suggest that perhaps the
authors have gazed at the sun a bit too long or have way to much privilege
coming out of their ass. There is no way I can distort the image of this little
boy’s suffering into an “optional” choice on his part or even perhaps more
perverted “God’s will”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/world/middleeast/syria-omran-photo-children.html?_r=0
The above statement that
suffering is something that is optional to me smacks of smug privilege. In
looking at my own attempts to ‘resist’ the Trump regime I need to carefully “resist”
personally falling into the trap of complacence. I have my Social Security and
Medicare and enjoy many of the benefits that seem to effortlessly fall on many
white males in America even many of us queer ones.
Can I just sit this out
for four years of Trump with the perhaps sad realization that my life may not
change much at all? Is it enough to assuage my conscience, as last Saturday
night’s Louis C.K. SNL skit pointed out, by sitting on the couch and posting
and sharing anti-Trump memes on Facebook or adding Black Lives Matter to my
profile? The obvious answer in this great piece of satire is that it certainly
doesn’t cover one’s sad attempt at ‘resisting’.
One of the things you
sometimes hear these days is “we survived Nixon and Reagan and we will survive
Trump too”. I have a couple observations on that statement. It may not apply to
the 55,000 Americans that died in Vietnam to say nothing of the millions of S.E
Asian lives lost during the Nixon presidency. And it behooves us to remember
how gay men fared during the Reagan years. This is poignantly brought home in
this photo of the small handful of members of the San Francisco Gay men’s
Chorus who survived the worst years of the AIDS epidemic in that City.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154952908052457&set=a.480735837456.252618.518017456&type=3&theater
Even if I personally may
get by the next four years relatively unscathed many will not. My personal call
to resist needs action to go with it or it is just self-indulgent masturbation.
This was brought home to me very directly with a sign I saw at the Women’s
March in San Francisco this last January, it was being carried by a frail and very
elderly women and read: “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit”. A
much different sentiment than “I don’t have time for this shit” don’t you
think.
© 10 Apr 2017 
About
the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised
on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40
plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS
activist. I have currently returned to
Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
Posted on

Pain, Wisdom Teeth, and Westchmerz, by Louis

The two parts to my essay are (a) physical pain and (b)
Welstschmerz.
(a)           
Back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s,
I was having trouble with my four wisdom teeth. The wisdom tooth pressing up
against its neighboring tooth caused extreme pain. The first wisdom tooth
extraction (Upper right) went rather well. A dentist got it out. The second
wisdom tooth (lower right) was more complicated so I had to go to Flushing
Hospital.
The
wisdom tooth resisted being extracted by the dental surgeon’s first attempt,
and he used a reasonably sized pliers. But as the wisdom tooth resisted, the
pain increased dramatically, and the dental surgeon kept choosing larger and
larger pliers. The last pair of pliers was quite enormous and resembled a
medieval torture instrument. For about a week after that, I just stayed drunk,
and I rinsed my mouth with whisky which is not only a good antiseptic, it
helped deaden the pain.
A
month or two after that, my two left wisdom teeth were pressing up against
their neighboring teeth. The pain was excruciating. So I chose an oral surgeon
or rather an oral surgery team.
I
lay down on a gurney, they gave me phenobarbital, and I went into a semi-dream
state, but I was still awake, and I was aware of the surgeon and the three or
four nurses assisting him who were hovering over me. They extracted both wisdom
teeth with surgery rather than yanking them out with pliers. Everything went
smoothly, I felt no pain, and the subsequent recuperation period had some pain
but it was minimal.
So,
if you need to have more than one tooth extracted at a time, choose oral
surgery. Phenobarbital was wonderful. You get anesthetized, but your body does
not feel threatened as with ether or other anesthesias. And you are still
actually awake.
(b)           
The other type of pain I have experienced
is Weltschmerz or “World pain,”
defined in Webster’s Dictionary as “sentimental pessimism or melancholy over
the state of the world”:
(1)           
JFK got assassinated. That trauma was
painful, but we discussed that already.
(2)           
The twin towers came down on 9/11/2001.
But of course we already discussed that trauma as well.
(3)           
President Nixon ordered the invasion of
Cambodia on May 8, 1970. I remember the protests in this country were swift and
enormous. I tried to go to a protest demonstration in Washington, D. C., but
there were just too many protesters. Our bus had to stop somewhere in the
outskirts of Washington, D. C., so we just sat there; some of the passengers
had guitars so we made the best of it by singing peace songs and Beatles’
songs. It was fun. But the invasion itself was traumatic and caused a lot of
people Weltschmerz.
(4)              
January 30, 1968 was the date of the Tet
Offensive. That was when we realized that, actually the Communists whooped us. On
April 30, 1975, the U. S. withdrew from Vietnam. Pictures of the “fall” of
Saigon were quite traumatic. I felt more Weltschmerz.
(5)           
The death of our two friends, Steve and
Randy.
On
a less serious note, the French language has two interesting tongue twisters,
that is le vire-langue (rarely used):
(a)           
Ton thé, t’ôte-t-il ta toux? Does
your tea get rid of your cough?
(b)        
La reine Didon dîna, dit-on, d’un dos dodu d’un dodu
dindon. The Queen of Carthage dined, they say, on the fat back
of a fat turkey.
Of
course, Dido (Didon) was not actually a queen, she was a princess, though she
did run ancient Carthage.
© 14 Sep 2017  
About the Author  

 I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City,
Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker
for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally
impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s.
I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few
interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I
graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.
                                       
Posted on

Where I Was in the 60’s by Louis

If you ask young people
today what they know about the 1960’s, some say the Beatles. Most are not aware
what a traumatic decade that was. As the war in Vietnam raged on and on and on,
pacifism and isolationism became more and more popular. The main problem with
the 60’s was the American people went left while the government went right.
There was a sort of  blow-up. The 1960’s
saw the blacks standing up and demanding their rights, and then there were the
riots. And then there were our riots that went on 3 days, the Stonewall riots,
that started on June 28, 1969. We must not forget either the assassination of
President Kennedy. (You were John Kennedy Jr.’s neighbor).
The only other
traumatic event that compares with the assassination of President Kennedy was
the blowing up of the Twin Towers. In both events, I think it is safe to say we
all felt personally threatened. I was an eye-witness to the blowing up of the
twin towers. I was on my way to work. I had to take a bus to get to the Long
Island Railroad stop that I took to get to work. On the bus route is a swampy
area with very low buildings that would enable the bus passenger to get a good
view of the twin towers. I saw smoke billowing out of the towers, and I
wondered what that was all about. When I got to the Long Island Railroad stop
in Flushing, I was told there was no service into Manhattan. Later I would know
why. So I tried the subway. I went a few stops to 61st Street. The
train stopped and the conductor said the train was not going any further since
the train was not permitted to enter Manhattan.
Where
were you when President John F. Kennedy was shot? I
remember I was on my way to swimming class in the Queens College gym. I never
got as far as the gym. A fellow student told me the President had been shot.
Next to the Queens College gym, that resembled an airplane hangar, was a
parking lot. The students with the cars turned on their car radios and let
passers-by listen. I listened and was horrified. Jack Kennedy was handsome,
well-educated, intelligent, well-spoken. Jacqueline Kennedy was beautiful,
soft-spoken, pretty much a perfect first lady. Remember how she remodeled the
White House? The whole world was dazzled. I was dazzled, and John Kennedy
convinced me that the USA would lead the world into a better place, that human
progress was going to continue. Our nasty right-wing neighbors in Dallas, Texas
had other ideas. Then Nixon got elected, and hope died, and it has been
downhill ever since, let’s face it.  
My
visit to the draft-board in lower Manhattan, on Whitehall Street:
I had to go for my physical. When the army doctor examined me, I told him I was
a homosexual, and I was pretty sure the U. S. military, for their reasons, did
not want homosexual men, I guess. So I asked to be excused on that basis though
I requested they do not write that down in my record. Whether they wrote that
down or not, I do not know. I did not show up in a gown, and I did not paint my
fingernails red, nothing like that. I got a 1-Y classification because I wore
glasses. My brother went through a long drawn-out rigmarole application process
as a conscientious objector. They ultimately denied his application for status
as a conscientious objector but they gave him a 1-Y classification. Much has
been made of student deferments in those days. Both I and my wannabe
conscientious objector brother were attending college, but we never received a
student deferment. Go figure. 1-Y meant we would not be drafted unless there
was a national emergency. I guess the Vietnam War was not considered a national
emergency for some unfathomable reason. Two of my other brothers got 1-Y
classifications. My oldest brother was in the Air Force, a major or something;
he got out when the Vietnam War was getting a little too hot.
© 19 May 2014
About the Author  
I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.