A Little, and a Long Way

OK—this is profoundly embarrassing. I am sitting in a café, which is where I spend a lot of my time. There are two reasons for the hours I spend here: the first is a need for people, since writing can be a solitary profession; the second is that I’m too lazy to make my own food.

I am therefore wasting huge sums of money, something that nobody but the shop owner could condone. And the worst thing? Though I am barely making enough money to keep afloat—as is Mr. Fernández—we are in the richest 4.0% of the world.

I know this because I went to a site called givingwhatwecan.org and entered a (probably too high) estimate of our combined incomes after taxes. And there, right on the page, was the button for “how rich am I?”

The sum I entered was 50,000 USD. OK, what happens when I put in 100,000 USD? “You are in the richest 0.15% of the world’s population,” was the answer. And 1,000,000 USD? Less that 0.1%.

The site is absolutely fascinating, as was the talk by the philosopher Peter Singer, which you can see below. I live perfectly well on $30,000 a year; I am 56; I am willing to donate 10% of my income; I will “retire” at age 65. OK, so I went to another page to see what effect I could have. And guess what? In the 9 years of giving, I would have saved 11 lives, I would have saved 491 years of healthy life, and I would have produced 9,000 years of school attendance.

But wait—suppose I retired at age 85? How would the world fare?

Total you would earn: 870,000 

Total you would donate: 87,000

Lives you could save: 35

Years of healthy life you could save: 1,582

Years of school attendance you'd produce: 29,000

That’s the graphic that popped up at me.

How is it possible? Singer has the explanation:

However, it is also possible to make extremely effective donations towards the world's poorest people. Because they have so little money, every dollar you give can make a tremendous difference — especially if spent on the world's most efficient aid programs. Read on to see just how much you could achieve and how little it would really cost you. 

 OK—so now you know what you’re worth, relative to the world population; as well, you know the effect of contributing whatever percent of your income you’ve chosen; now, where should your money go?

And it’s an important question, because the right charity can be a hundred times more effective than another, less effective one. So which charity gives you the biggest bang for the buck?

Here again, Singer sails through with the answer. He recommends four charities that are the most effective. Here are the four.

Against Malaria Foundation. Why? More than a million people die each year of malaria, 70% of them are kids under 5. A 3$ net can prevent the disease—and 100% of your money goes to the nets. Best of all, you can see where your nets are distributed.  Here’s the website: http://www.againstmalaria.com

Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. The initiative aims to control and then eliminate the parasitical disease schistosomiasis, which afflicts more than 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. Untreated, schistosomiasis leads to kidney, liver, and spleen damage; 76 cents will provide a dose of the drug needed to treat and cure. Here’s the website. http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/schisto

Deworm The World. 600 million kids around the world need to be dewormed; less than fifty cents is all it takes to treat one kid. This organization has treated 40 million children in 27 countries. Best, treating kids leads to significantly improved school attendance—a nice added benefit. Here’s the website.   http://www.dewormtheworld.org

Project Healthy Children. The project aims to confront malnutrition by food fortification, essentially supplying the vitamins that you and I take for granted. But a child goes blind every minute—80% of them because of vitamin deficiency. Zinc deficiency kills 800,000 children a year; Vitamin A deficiency kills 2.5 million children under age 5 every year. Here’s the website.  http://projecthealthychildren.org  

Singer came up with the idea of asking people to pledge 10% of their income until the day they retire. Here’s the pledge:

The Pledge to Give

I recognize that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good in the developing world. Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that from today until the day I retire, I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn to whichever organizations can most effectively use it to help people in developing countries. I make this pledge freely, openly, and without regret.

As well, he came up with the idea of forming chapters of people who are working together to practice effective charity. So far, there are 10 chapters, 317 members, and $126,300,000 pledged.

OK—this is what I’m gonna do. Every day, I’m going to put my change into a piggy bank, which I will empty when full. I’ll take it to the bank, and get it changed; then, I’ll send a quarter of that amount to each one of the four charities.

Second strategy, I’ll play Bach suites once a week in the café where I am spending so profligately my money. I’ll put up a little sign announcing the charity of the week, and ask for donations.

Singer makes two further points—the materialist rat race of working to make money to spend money on stuff that doesn’t make us feel better but does mean we have to go back to work the next day is ridiculous. But oddly, giving money to a worthy cause does make us feel better. So shouldn’t we change trains?

Second, in terms of human impact, the money you donate may be the most important thing—by far—you’ll ever do in your life. 

Una Dama, Though Cynical

“Quizzical,” I thought, when I first saw Antonio Quiñones Calderón. There was something—perhaps an ever-so-slightly raised eyebrow—that suggested puzzlement. Or perhaps it was a newspaperman’s curiosity mixed with slight anxiety?

I have a minor talent—I put people at ease. He sat down and told me his story.

And what a remarkable story. Tony grew up in a small town on the west side of the island seven decades ago; his father died either before he was born or just afterwards (can’t recall). At any rate, he grew up early assuming responsibility.

As well as writing. So he wrote his way through high school, and then headed off to work—he had to help his mother and sister back home. And where does a writer who needs a job get one?

At El Mundo, now defunct but then a very serious, respected newspaper. And Tony—fresh out of high school, no money or time for college—started at the bottom. And he worked his way up, in traditional newspaper fashion, from writing obits to the police beat to covering municipal meetings, to finally get the big stuff.

“I remember the funeral of Muñoz Marín—I was covering it for El Mundo,” he said, “and yes, it was big….”

I’m picking his brains, first because the pickings are very good indeed, and second to get him to talk. What is he writing about now?

“A history of the corruption in Puerto Rico,” said Tony.

“Tony, that’s gonna be one long book,” I said.

We joke a bit—he has a wry, self-deprecating humor.

“And how is your health,” I asked—Tony is in his mid-seventies.

Well, I shouldn’t have worried: Tony has one impressive track record. He wakes up and writes, seven days a week. And he’s put together an impressive body of work: 50 Décadas de historia puertoriqueña, published in 1992; La perversión de la política; En los pasillos de poder: Testimonio íntimo de un Secretario de Prensa, 1998; Reflexiones de periodista; El Libro de Puerto Rico; the list goes on and on up until his most recent book, Carlos Romero Barceló: Una vida por la Igualidad. He has about as many books as you and I have fingers and toes.

Well, if anyone can write a book about ex-governor Romero Barceló, it would be Tony. Why? Because he was press secretary for two terms for him, and served in the same capacity for former Governor Luis A. Ferré.

He is unabashedly a statehooder, feeling—as Ferré did—that he preferred to be a state, but if the US said “no,” he’d be quite content to be independent. But colony is anathema to him.

And though a statehooder, he’s tough and fair-minded: he cuts the politicians who favor statehood no slack.

“You’re a cynical old newspaperman,” I told him, after he had pronounced our legislators “gangsters.”

“Old? Old? The rest I accept, but old?”

Relatively speaking, Tony may have a point: his mother is 92 and going strong.

Well, I know newspaper people, having grown up around them. And Tony reminds me very much of my own father: hardworking, critical but just, dig-until-you-hit-the-pay-dirt.

There’s something more about Tony. Beyond knowing more than almost anyone about the political history of Puerto Rico, he’s an expression of something wonderful about Puerto Rico. A self-made man, he sent his kids off to the States; two of them went to Yale. They’re now judges, lawyers, doctors.

We agreed about it a couple weeks ago. What keeps us on this island, with our horrendous crime, our gangster legislature, our continuing economic crisis? Why don’t we bail out and move to Florida; why not join the majority of Puerto Ricans who live off, not on, the island?

The people.

The people like Tony: gentle, kind, scrupulously honest, and gently self-ironic. He is egalitarian in a noble way, extending the same courtesy to all. My mother would have called him a “sweet man.”

But we have an expression, down here, probably very old, probably directly from Spain.

Él es una dama.

Notes from a blubbering blogger

It took me a while, but I got it in the end. I have spent an hour quietly crying in a—thank god—mostly empty café.

It was seeing one of the defendants in the Proposition 8 case choke up, put his hand on his husband’s shoulder and say, through tears, “will you please marry me?”

I cry at everything—show me a picture of you daughter’s kindergarten graduation: I’ll cry. A picture of a boy scout helping an old lady across the street? I’ll weep. Hell, in those days when I was busy worrying about my aged mother, the very picture of an old lady would set off sobs.

So I was puzzled by my initial reaction, which—as I told Johnny, my brother—was to kill Antonin Scalia.

“You could take out the other four as well, “ he said.

What happened?

We all came out, or most of us; for most of us, love triumphed. It took some parents a long time, but they got it. It took some gay people a long time, too. But the realization of what life in the closet was like led many of us to say, “fuck it, I’m not hiding it.”

It was a message you didn’t want to give yourself. “I’m not ashamed of myself,” people in the closet would say, “but I’m just not a political person….”

Here’s another….

“It would kill my parents. They’re very religious, very conservative, very….”

Every time you went home, you went home wondering—would this be the time you’d finally have the balls to be honest with your parents? I mean look, you’re in your thirties, you have never brought a girl home, you didn’t date in high school. I mean, do I have to draw you a map?

The amount of energy it took was endless. Nothing was ever easy between you and your parents; there were no relaxed moments. What would you say if they asked? And were they hinting? What was your father saying, when he made a reference—rather forced—to two men who had lived together for years? Was he signaling?

Gary, an old lover, had a big party, to which he invited my parents. And so I met Franny, who was busy chatting with a flamboyantly gay man, a man who undressed me with his eyes, and obviously found me fetching (I may have been then).

“Marc, do you know Rocky?” (…the name being the only masculine thing about him.)

Rocky took my hand in both of his, refused to let go, and breathed, “Darling, I’ve waited all my life to meet you….”

Right—and what was that look in my mother’s eye?

The secret meant that you always had butterflies in your stomach, sweaty palms, a dry mouth. You were prepared to fight or flee—and remember, these are your parents, not your enemies.

You became hypersensitive and a master at reading faces, intonations, gestures. Your nose was always picking up the whiff of suspicion, innuendo, barbed hints. At the end of the day, after you had watched yourself pass on the thirty or forty times that you could have dropped the news, you went to bed exhausted and hating yourself. Why were you so weak?

You were also blaming them—which made no sense, but there it was. Why the hell were they so damn conservative? Why were they so old, so behind the times? A friend comes out to her mother, who pulls a bottle of champagne out to celebrate? Right, and you’re gonna give your father a coronary, and he’ll die right there on the fucking floor, his eyes locking in horror with yours, as your mother is screaming, “See what you’ve done! You’ve killed him!” Right, so that’ll be the scene that replays every damn time you close your eyes at night for the rest of your life….

This is complete nonsense, you know. It’s also now 2AM, a time of day which twists logic the way a psychokinetic twists forks. Oh, and you can’t get up and do anything, because it’s not your house. You’re visiting, your mother is sleeping in the dining room; your father is turning and snorting in the living room. It’s a strange house, and you’re prisoner in the back bedroom.

You’re in the car, they are driving you to the airport, you’ve failed this visit just as you had failed all the others. Do you blurt it out? Of course not, you can’t drop that on then, and then just take off.

You drove your friends who were farther down the road crazy.

“Why doesn’t she just come out to her father—I mean, her father has accepting her brother’s male partner. Hell, if he can do that, he can take a lesbian daughter!”

I’d say this about a friend we both knew.

But I also remembered being there—trapped in car lights of fear and rejection, unable to move, watching as the inevitable came hurtling toward me.

Afraid to make the jump to love and trust….

Variations on Infinity

“Bach for when I need to understand, Beethoven when I need courage,” said Susan, or words to that effect. So what am I listening to, just now?

Bach—Goldberg Variations, as arranged for string trio.

Right, so now you get the picture. A major victory for LGBT has left me feeling less than elated; now it’s time to get back to an emotional even keel. It’s time to get over the rant and the rage, and there’s nothing better than Bach for that.

OK, this work comes with a story that may or not be true. Goldberg was a musician in the electoral court of the Saxony, employed by the Russian ambassador, Count Keyserlingk. And the count, so goes the story, couldn’t sleep. So Bach was pressed into service; could he write some nice soporific music that Goldberg could play to lull him to sleep? 

Bach decided to write a set of thirty variations on a theme, an aria which is a sarabande, an old dance form that Bach would also use in the cello suites. And the count, so the story runs, was delighted—so much that he gave Bach a gold goblet filled with 100 louis-d’or.

Well, the story was written some sixty years after the work was published, Bach was long dead, and face it—it has that Washington-chopping-down-the-cherry-tree feeling. As well, I’m always a little skeptical about stories that have louis-d’or in them… 

Most of Bach’s works went unpublished in his lifetime; the Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, were an exception. And it’s our good luck to have 19 of the first editions still in existence—one of which has corrections in Bach’s own hand. Oh, and also a set of fourteen canons.

Well, I was familiar with the work—I walked for months to the beach while listening to it in those raw days when I had lost my mind and my job (in order of importance if not chronology). But what I didn’t know is that there is an internal structure, though I sensed it. Every third variation is a canon, which means that one instrument is playing the same thing slightly later (think “row, row, row your boat…”). After the canon, Bach wrote what Wikipedia calls a genre piece—baroque dances, a couple of aria, a fughetta. After the genre piece comes what one musician calls an arabesque—a fast, lively piece with the left or right hand crossing over the other.

There are also variations that are heart-wrenchingly poignant, including one which Wanda Landowska termed “The black pearl.” They are almost too painful to listen to; Bach has ripped his chest open, the ribs are bloody and broken, the fist-sized heart is clenching and unclenching amid the blood and cartilage. You want not to look, but you have to. It’s agonizing music to hear.

But one day I did, and here’s what I wrote:

So each morning I walked to the beach listening to the Goldberg Variations. And then, after a week of turmoil, I walked by the walls of the old city to the mouth of the harbor, and confronted the open sea. 

And heard the music you’ll hear below.

And said, finally, goodbye to Franny.

Who’s gone, and who isn’t.

I was crying, I was shaking, I was wracked with gratitude for a woman who had given me life. And I was amazed that she had placed her own life in my hands, and entrusted me with her death.

She had all the nobility of all her dogs and cats for whom she had done them same.

“You can go now,” I said. “I’m OK now.”

And I was.

“There’s some music that never really stops, that just goes on and on forever, on some other plane,” a cello teacher once said about the worst piece of music Bach ever wrote, the prelude to the first cello suite. I didn’t believe it about the prelude, but about the Goldberg Variations?

Totally.

Paradoxical Reaction

COURT STRIKES DOWN U.S. MARRIAGE ACT

5-4 Ruling Is a Landmark Victory for Gay Rights

‘DOMA’s principal effect is to identify and make unequal a subset of state-sanctioned marriages.’ — JUSTICE ANTHONY M. KENNEDY

I’m having a paradoxical reaction.

I should be jubilant—the Supreme Court of the United States of America has just struck down the odious Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and has ruled that the opponents of same-sex marriage in California did not have standing to sue. That, presumably, clears the way for marriage equality in California. So now it’s 13 down, 37 to go.

I should be jubilant; I’m not.

I’m pissed.

I’m pissed that four out of the nine justices are so fucking behind the times that they cannot see an elemental principle here. I’m pissed that we have to celebrate this damn victory at all. I’m pissed that there ever WAS a fucking DOMA and that we had to spend all of our time and energy and money to defeat it.

You know, I’m pissed at the amount of time and energy I have had to devote in my life to come out, to face rejection (most of it imagined, very little of it real), to deal with my own internalized homophobia, to learn how to speak out.

“You’ve had the hardest struggle,” said Eric, the week my mother died. We were talking about our lives, our three lives (my other brother included).

Damn right I did, Eric. We all flocked to your two weddings, you didn’t have the grace to congratulate me, even acknowledge mine. I got married in a city clerk’s office, and it was just Raf and I. For very good reasons, Franny and John and Jeanne weren’t there. But I was happy, in a way, that it was just the two of us. Because that’s the way it had been for so many years.

Until you live it, there’s no way to understand the insidious pressure against a gay marriage. A very nice woman has invited me to attend a party at a restaurant celebrating the 75^th birthday of her husband, whom I know, but whom Raf does not. Well, it was a quandary—I really couldn’t call her up and say, “hey, can Raf come?” I couldn’t call her and say, “I don’t go places without my husband.” So should I go, or should I invent an excuse?

I decided to go, but not before realizing that my parents would

1.     never have been in the situation

2.     never have chosen for one person to go, the other to stay home

Consider—would I have invited the woman to a dinner on Saturday night, and not invited as well her husband? Don’t think so—I would have sucked it up and paid for the extra plate or not invited her at all.

“How long have you been together,” asked a guy recently, and why did I think there was something smug, condescending about the question? Am I really that prickly?

So why wasn’t I surprised when his jaw dropped on hearing that it’s about thirty years now? He was expecting, what—two?

I made a decision years ago—I was damned if I was going to be a victim. I hate people who whine and bemoan their fate and complain. I have had incredible luck—I’m male and white and middle class. I had tremendous parents. I’ve had more luck in life than most people, and I have no right to complain.

Maybe it was this that did it to me:

“In the majority’s telling, this story is black-and-white: Hate your neighbor or come along with us,” Justice Scalia wrote in his dissent. “The truth is more complicated.”

Yeah? This is a slap in the face on two levels. We are accused of being simplistic, unable to see the more complicated truth that Justice—sorry, I’m demoting you now—justice Scalia (that cap by convention only) can see. And we are accused of saying that those justices who don’t go along with us are hateful.

You know, I think some things are pretty simple. Great, DOMA is dead, but will I get Raf’s social security, or he mine? Not unless we move to a state where my marriage is recognized. So we're going to have years of more struggle, when we should be doing other things, like helping the 2.8 million LGBT kids get off the streets.

And no, Scalia, I don’t think you hate me. You don’t know me, and guess what? If you did, you’d like me. If you spent a month in my home, you would have voted the other way.

Or maybe not, who knows?

“And so you are one of those rare men who approve of the education of women,” said a don to Lord Peter Wimsey, in one of Dorothy L. Sayer’s novels.

“You should not permit me the right to approve or not,” he returned.

Exactly—and now I get it. That’s why I’m pissed. There’s no particular joy in this—not for me, not now. I’m back fighting as I have for so many damn years a bunch of people who have the power to affect my and my husband’s lives in significant ways. What we have had to fight and struggle for they take for granted. OK—I’ll be happy later on.

Right now?

I’m pissed.

Let Me Just Slip Into This Black Robe, Here

Well, the first thing that has to be said about Alain de Botton is that he’s phenomenally wise, profoundly insightful, unimaginably creative and wonderfully incisive.

I say all this, by the way, to avoid a repetition of the 2009 incident in which de Botton wrote, “I will hate you until the day I die,” to a New York Times critic, who had been less than kind about a book de Botton had written. 

In fact, I have liked all of the de Botton talks that I have seen on YouTube—he does have a razor-sharp mind, but who, graduating with a double-starred first from Caius College, Cambridge, wouldn’t?

There was the talk on atheism 2.0. The old version of atheism only established one thing: there is no god. OK—but what about the good things that religion brought us? A sense of community—there are times when a congregation carries a grief-stricken parishioner through dark times. Or what about morality? Yes, you can argue that a person shouldn’t need god to be moral; as well, many atheists are moral. But the church, ideally, was or is a constant, drumming force for reminding us to be living a moral life. And I liked what de Botton said about religion’s view on art: it is completely not art for art’s sake. It is strictly utilitarian; the purpose of art is to elicit emotion and teach lessons. That’s why you have that depiction of Christ on the cross, or the last supper, or Moses parting the Red Sea. It’s there for a reason.

I followed him through the lecture, “A kinder, gentler, philosophy of success.” Interesting, there, what he had to say about meritocracy, which he, in general, favors. Who couldn’t—it’s the belief that anyone, with enough work, can get what he deserves. That’s great in the case of Obama, but what about me? Iguanas has sold maybe six copies, so am I a dud? Do I deserve my failure?

De Botton says no—remember Mathew 24:13? “The race is not given to the swift nor the strong but he who endures to the end?” (Franny may be channeling me, or I her, but shouldn’t it be “him who endures?”) OK—that wasn’t actually his point, on rereading Mathew. De Botton thinks that despite all of our efforts, the playing field will never be entirely level. And he should know—his father was a seriously rich guy, though not, apparently, a terribly supportive one. My father was middle class but supportive—so who had the better deal? The thing is that in both cases it makes a difference, and neither he nor I had any say in the matter.

Then of course I had to listen to his talk about “How to think more about sex.” I mean, what guy wouldn’t? And that, finally, led me to Barbara Ehrenreich, whose book Smile or Die; How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. I had liked the book, and could especially relate to it, since I had been through about 94 doses of quite concentrated positive thinking in my seven years at Wal-Mart. We had a monthly meeting, a regular feature of which was the motivational speaker. One particular speaker was a charming old lady who had to be lugged up to the stage because the cancer treatment was still affecting her but. not to worry, because the world was getting.., and here she broke into song…

Mejor, mejor, mejor!

Yes, her world was getting better, better, better—sing it, group! Sing it, everybody! Put your heart in your mouths and a smile on your face and beam your positive attitude into the radiant white light! Let’s hear it again!

We sang it again.

And even though it’s Monday, and it rained all weekend, and the housework never did get done—we’re alive, we’ve got jobs, we’ve got our families, and every day we can be sure that we are getting…

She put her ear to the microphone….

I loved all that stuff. Well, most of it. There was a day, in those months when I spent waiting for the ax to fall, when I came upon the in-house motivational speaker, Milton, filling up buckets of water before a Human Resources meeting. And no, he wasn’t the kind of guy who mops floors.

I could bear it no more; the meeting was mandatory and I skipped it.

Which may be why I’m not there.

Ehrenreich states that the main reason people are canned is because of their bad attitude, and asking skeptical questions about everybody’s great idea—hey, let’s give mortgages to people with lousy credit and then bundle ‘em up and sell ‘em off (sorry, the mortgages, not the people)—was a classic example of negativity. It’s not, of course; it’s a critical part of an organization. There’s a place for the people who refused to be swayed by the latest craziness.

Well, de Botton has started The School of Life; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

The School of Life is a social enterprise founded in 2008 and based in a small shop in Central London. The School offers a variety of programmes and services concerned with how to live wisely and well, addressing such questions as why work is often unfulfilling, why relationships can be so challenging, why it is ever harder to stay calm and what one could do to try to change the world for the better.[1] The School also offers psychotherapy and bibliotherapy services and runs a small shop which has been described as 'an apothecary for the mind'.[2]

Wow—what a seriously good idea! Oh, and what do atheistic you do when you’re in London on a Sunday morning? Here’s the answer:

On Sunday mornings The School of Life hosts secular sermons in which cultural figures are invited to give their opinion about 'what values we should live by today'.[7] These theatrical events are usually held at Conway Hall in London. Past preachers have included Tom Hodgkinson on Loving Your Neighbour, Geoff Dyer on Punctuality, Sam Roddick on Seduction and Alain de Botton on Pessimism.[8] The Financial Times described the sermons as being 'hedged about with all sorts of ironic paraphernalia, designed to reassure the trendy young audience that they are not about to be harangued by a religious zealot'.[9]

Oh, and that bibliotherapy up there? Here’s the answer:

 The School of Life offers a literary consultation service it calls bibliotherapy.[10] For a fee, people are able to meet with a bibliotherapist who will talk to them about their reading habits and 'prescribe' books which relate to their interests or concerns. The School of Life's bibliotherapists include the novelist Susan Elderkin.

Confession: I completely screwed up my last goal, which was to tell everybody in the world by midnight, 31 December 2012, that they could have a good, peaceful, spiritually charged death in their home at the hour (or thereabouts) of their choosing.

 I fucked up.

Alain, can I come give a sermon?

A Cry to Stamps!

For half a century (OK, really only 48 years) J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI, as well as threatening the hell out of everyone. He did it illegally.

For the last ten years (OK, really 12 years) two presidents have signed off on a program that allows the NSA to collect information on our telephone calls, emails, and text messages. They’re doing it legally.

We had all been saying it for years, all of us “radical” people who couldn’t quite get why we had to sit in Vietnamese rice paddies, watch little kids approach, and wonder if they had bombs under their dirty shirts. We spoke out against the infiltrators, the bugged telephones, the informers, all of the people spying on us as we protested an unjust war.

I miss it, those innocent years before we paid others to fight our wars, and before we gave away our privacy to the government, instead of protesting it. And I may as well confess, I’m mostly of the opinion that Edward Snowden acted correctly when he exposed the secret programs that are spying on us all.

Why?

Because we wouldn’t have known, otherwise. And because everything—OK, much of what—we know about J. Edgar Hoover came from a similar action. Somebody—nobody knows who but you can bet it wasn’t for lack of trying—stole secret files from an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.

It was a night in 1971, and most of the United States was watching Joe Frazier fight Muhammad Ali. But a guy or guys from the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI grabbed a crowbar, wrenched the 2-man FBI office, and filched the files. All in all, over a thousand documents were taken.

Two weeks later, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times got manila envelopes with copies of documents. There was the report on sending a tape to Martin Luther King; the tape showed King in his hotel room with women, not his wife. That came accompanied by a note: “King, there is one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.”

That presumably meant suicide, which was the option actress Jean Seberg opted for, after a (false) rumor was published saying that the father of her unborn child was a Black Panther, not her French husband.

Want more? Here’s one writer on the subject:

The sheer reach of a completely politicized FBI was one of the most frightening revelations of the Media documents. Underground newspapers were targeted. Students (and their professors) were targeted. Celebrities were targeted. The Communist Party of the U.S.A., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Non-Violent Organizing Committee, the Black Panther Party, the Women's Strike for Peace -- all were targeted. "Neutralize them in the same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralize the U.S.," one memo said.

 Attorney General John N. Mitchell asked Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, saying that doing so could “endanger people’s lives”—those people out there spyi…err, collecting information vital for our national security.

It was only through that one act—forcing a window, raiding two file cabinets—that we understood or rather we knew what we had always known. As well, we got a new term—COINTELPRO, or counter-intelligence program.

A few months after the break-in, Daniel Ellsberg came forth with the Pentagon Papers, which revealed that the government knew early on that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and that the Johnson administration had lied to the people, and to the Congress. All of that lead to the Church Committee, which has been described as the most—well, here’s Wikipedia….

Together, the Church Committee's reports have been said to constitute the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but more than 50,000 pages have since been declassified under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

The report revealed that it wasn’t just at home that our intelligence system had gone seriously off whack. Here’s more Wikipedia, from the same source:

Among the matters investigated were attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Welsh Dulles's plan, approved by the President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to use the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba.

So now we have a president who is telling us that we should trust these secret programs because there is a mechanism to oversee them and so all is OK. But, in fact, a meeting that was called before the Snowden affair of the heads of the intelligence agencies and Congress had only 48 senators and representatives show up. The meeting was on a Friday afternoon—the boys skipped out early that day.

Oh, and the FISA judges approved every request from the NSA—all 1856 of them. Odd, why am I thinking just now of rubber stamps?

Hmmm, you know, it’s not a bad idea I have. Readers of this blog know that, for seven years, I worked for a small company named Wal-Mart. My efforts in that enterprise consisted largely of sitting a room, pounding on tables, and throwing pencils at small groups of people. That all ended one Friday morning, after the company had done an extensive re-alignment. I was outta line.

So what to do now?

Readers, be the first on your block to buy in. Give yourself a double shot of self congratulations by helping a deserving blogger and your government. For ten bucks (plus handling and shipping, as well as taxes where applicabl… oh, and you ladies down there in Tobago—I know you’re there—I gotta charge more) I’ll send you this valuable item, which you in turn (and in protest) can send to the federal government. The one crucial thing they obviously don’t have….

2.8 Million Kids

We’d like to think it’s easier, now, but I think it’s not. When I was a teenager, gay was nowhere; it was un-talked about, it was taboo, it surfaced maybe once every two years in an article in Time. You’d see the pictures of the backs of men lurking in dark corners of smoky bars, in the shadows of abandoned warehouses, waiting, watching. Short of vampires, nobody, apparently, got less sun than we did.

So I could hide. I wasn’t too visibly gay, I was a musician—which meant that I was instantly weird anyway—and I was tall. It was easy for me. Here was my strategy: I pushed away dealing with being gay until I was older, in college, when I was better equipped to deal with it. Even so, it’s certainly one of the five hardest things I’ve done in my life.

Now, gay is everywhere. Which means that it’s on even adolescent’s radar screen. Which also means that the first hint that a kid is gay brings on condemnation, bullying, fear of rejection.

Which is often justified—the fear, I mean, not the rejection. Because while all of us are fighting for marriage equality, an issue of equal or even greater weight is going unaddressed.

There are 2.8 million gay kids homeless on the streets. Up to 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ. Think about it—unless 2 out of five of all of the people you know are gay, that 40% represents an enormous skew.

And why are they on the streets? Take a look at the graphic below.

One study published in the Journal Pediatrics reports that half of LGBT kids experience rejection in some form from their parents. Granted, the study was from 1987—but is the situation better or worse, now? (Remafedi, Gary. (1987). "Male Homosexuality: The Adolescent's Perspective." Pediatrics, Issue 79. pp. 326-337.)

Once kids are on the street, what happens to them? You know perfectly well—the parent’s worst nightmare. Prostitution, drug addiction, HIV and AIDS, the litany of horrors that keep parents awake at night.

There aren’t enough shelters, and those that exist have age limits. So it’s a race; how fast can you get the kid ready for an independent life? This is a kid who needs to graduate from school, learn adult skills like driving and paying your bills, learn how to cook and negotiate the health care system when sick. That’s hard enough when you have a home and loving parents.

Sadly, most parents are loving parents—one researcher went off and talked to the parents of kids who had either been kicked out or had fled the house. Only about 2% maintained their stance of rejection, especially after hearing the statistics and descriptions of LGBT youth in the streets. They were loving, they were anguished, they were confused.

There are programs, there are people trying to help. Caitlin Ryan and Rafael Diaz started the Family Acceptance Project; here’s what they say:

The project is designed to: 1) study parents’, families' and caregivers’ reactions and adjustment to an adolescent's coming out and LGBT identity; 2) develop training and assessment materials for health, mental health, and school-based providers, child welfare, juvenile justice, family service workers and community service providers on working with LGBT youth and families; 3) develop resources to strengthen families to support LGBT children and adolescents; and 4) develop a new model of family-related care to improve health and mental health outcomes for LGBT adolescents. Findings will be used to inform policy and practice and to change the way that systems of care address the needs of LGBT adolescents.

And Ryan’s done more; she got ahold of John Kerry, and together they forged the Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act. Here’s the description:

The Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act requires that the Secretary of Health and Human Services establish a demonstration project to develop programs that are focused on improving family relationships and reducing homelessness for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. These programs must include research-based behavioral interventions designed to decrease rejecting behaviors and increase supportive behaviors in families with LGBT youth and research-based assessment tools to help identify LGBT youth at risk for family conflict or ejection from their homes. Additionally, the Secretary must provide educational tools and resources to help families identify behaviors that put LGBT youth at risk as well as provide multimedia educational tools and resources that are focused on helping a diverse range of families understand how their behavior affects LGBT youth.

OK—let’s strip it of jargon. We gotta figure out which kids are at risk, what stuff works to get parents to start accepting, not rejecting, and then we gotta get the tools and resources out there.

And I think that we gay people who have made it through to the other side, who have spent some time navigating the land-mined landscape of fear, rejection, self-loathing, loneliness, despair and defeat—we’ve got to go back there, cross over again, and start bringing some kids with us.

Over to the other side.