Alienizing, scapegoating, and cleansing (ASC) — what was intended as a very complex posting following on two occasions: the shootings at the Colorado Springs gay bar Club Q just before midnight on Saturday 11/19; and yesterday’s Harvey Milk Day, remembering the 11/27/1978 assassination of SF Supervisor Harvey Milk, killed because he was the driving force behind the city’s first gay rights bill.
Over the Club Q shootings I was consumed by fits of red-hot rage combined with body-wracking weeping sorrow, not to mention fear over where events are taking us. As I said yesterday in my posting “Lest we forget”, about Milk’s assassination,
I would say NEVER AGAIN — but it is far far too late for that.
The social mechanisms at work in these wrenching cases involving homosexuals — what I’ll call alienizing, scapegoating, and cleansing — reappear with other groups, in particular Jews and Blacks, leading to murderous assaults on the locations of supportive and protective community, on “safe spaces”. At, for example:
— the Pulse (gay, leaning Latino) nightclub in Orlando FL in June 2016
— the Tops Friendly Market (in a predominantly Black neighborhood) in Buffalo NY in July 2022
— the Tree of Life synagogue, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood (about 40% Jewish) of Pittsburgh PA in October 2018
Meanwhile, my life is a mess. At the moment, much of every day is consumed by narcoleptic sleep, and my many disabilities cause me to take about five times as long to do everyday tasks as a fully able-bodied person would, so I’ve been having trouble finding the time to put the ASC posting together from the materials I’ve been assembling.
My solution is to post, as often as I can, collections of some of these materials, hoping that eventually I’ll be able to knit it together. (Some of these materials will be surprising to you. My first collection will probably be one that starts with Donald Sutherland screaming. Yes, it’s relevant.)
