What I would have liked to share with them, of course, is the message of the story of Blue WIllow by Doris Gates which teaches us that when times are hard and there is more and more trouble in our lives, we may be called upon to sacrifice the one thing that is most dear to us, for the greater good.

What experience teaches us, however, is that when trouble comes along and times are hard, those who have something dear to them may be unwilling to give it up, and therefore inclined to kick the less fortunate among them under the bus.  Nowhere is this more evident these days than in the area of non-profits. 

My recent work for a non-profit set up to teach literacy to adults is a case in point.  When the endowment for this important program was invested (instead of being left in the bank) and subsequently diminished, senior management reduced the staff, reduced hours, and reduced everything they could in fact except senior management itself. 

Now I have learned that on the other coast a well-known non-profit organization has done the same thing, reducing staff, reducing staff benefits, but not reducing or adjusting senior management staff or senior management benefits. 

I was thinking back to the old days when I was living in New York and everyone was dying and GMHC was the place so many of us, out of desperate need and fear, turned for help.  Some of us even found our calling in the rewarding not-for-profit work of helping others.  But what happens when yet more trouble comes along and funding dwindles and expenses mount and the people you're trying to help are worse off than you ever were?  I asked friends of mine who continue to serve the underprivileged and needy.

"Gay senior management," one source advised me, "never gives themselves pay cuts.  Trust me.  They'll tell you it's so they can 'remain competitive' but hey, that's the same argument the banks used for those big performance bonuses to their executives too, isn't it."

"Honey," said another former colleague, wise to the ways of the world, "the people who need help most these days are people of color, people who got immigration problems, bad drug problems, landlord problems, mental problems -- I'm talkin' 'bout people who ain't trying to get their nuptials announced in the New York Times, you hear what I'm sayin'?  You think the white boys in their Harvard baseball caps gonna cut back for the po folk?  Think again.  And ain't no gay white boy press gonna talk about it neither."

As you know, in 1904, when Doris Gates (1901-1987) was three years old, there was plenty of trouble, and there continued to be trouble, and there is conceivably more trouble in the world now than there was back then.  The deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett will eclipse, for a while at least, some of that trouble of the sort we can see around us.  And those of us who survive and move on, still holding on to a few precious things we've managed to acquire or not lose along the way may think ourselves justified in the holding on.  

The dangerous people in this world are not the ones who have so much they can afford to lose something, and not the ones who are so poor they have nothing to lose.  It's those people in the middle, who are clutching something they're afraid to give up, who think they have something they can't afford to let go of.  The ones who have slept and worked and clawed their way to the middle -- they're the ones you have to look out for.