How soon is too soon?

“When’s the right time?”

 

This is a question I’ve been asking myself lately. Recently, Ed Koch died. In case you didn’t know, Koch was the mayor of New York from 78-89, during the AIDS epidemic. You can read a bit about his record here. http://gawker.com/5980791/ed-koch-is-dead?popular=true (Yes, I know it’s Gawker, but it’s a pretty good article regardless.)

 

On the day of his death, I was driving around in my car, and heard a lot about how sad it was that Koch died. This irritated me. Many activists, including Larry Kramer, founder of GMHC and ACT UP, accuse Koch of murderous indifference and inaction to the suffering of the gay community in those days. I brought this up on my Facebook the day of (You can see the posts on Feb 1). While I received support, I also received criticism that it was too soon to mention these things.

 

My question is: when is the right time to start discussing the foibles and failures of public officials / celebrities after they die? One day? One week? A month? A year? This is an honest question.

 

Does it have to do with the egregiousness of their offenses? There is obviously a line in the sand somewhere. Nobody was sad when Eichmann was assassinated, and nobody shed any tears when Pol Pot died. At some point, a person can do so much evil that it outweighs any potential good. (Note: I don’t believe that Koch’s mistakes even approach those of Eichmann and Pot.)

 

 

Does your proximity to the wounded parties affect it? I would say it does. There’s a difference between, say, someone posting on Facebook and someone protesting a funeral. I was compared to the WBC, which I thought wasn’t at all accurate – mostly because I was standing up for queer rights, not attempting to destroy them, and my proximity to Koch and his loved ones was fairly distant at best. I didn’t, and wouldn’t, go to Koch’s funeral and hold a sign and shout.

 

But there’s something that really sticks in my craw when people defend Koch’s right to die on clean white sheets, and afterward have his image burnished, while gay men died by the thousands in New York City, shunned by hospitals and ignored by the government, in incredibly painful and humiliating ways, while many Americans called AIDS some kind of holy retribution against queer people. How can we be silent? How can we forget that?

 

On another note, my friend Thomas Fucaloro asked me how discussing Koch’s callous failure to address the AIDS epidemic in the 80s helps today’s victims. After doing some thinking, I decided that we can’t address the present state of an issue without understanding and remembering the history of oppression that helped create this issue. AIDS got as bad as it did for a reason. Koch is not the only person who shrunk away from this issue, nor is he the only one to blame. But his actions should not be forgotten. Remembering helps us struggle, helps us connect to our past, and remember who our enemies are. It’s not the rotating cast of cardboard villains presented in entertainment news – it’s the people in power who would declare us less than human.

 

How long did it take us to truly remember what Christopher Columbus did? Andrew Jackson? These men are absolutely blood-soaked. And there are places in America where children are still not learning the truth about their history. This should worry anyone.

 

Mourning is important, but I believe that remembering the stories of our nations, particularly the stories of oppressed and silenced communities is also important – It may be even *more* important.  When you see history through rose-tinted glasses that glamorize our successes and obscure our failures, you fail to learn from it.

 

If I’ve learned one thing in my life, it’s that fact. “Never forget” is more than a pithy slogan – it’s the only way out of oppression.

 

In closing, I must admit: I am terrified that the death of George W. Bush will lead people to claim that he “helmed the ship during a difficult time in American history” rather than acknowledge that his actions precipitated the massive erosion of civil rights and international war that claimed thousands of American, Afghani, and Iraqi lives unnecessarily. How did we forget the lessons of Vietnam, and the violence, surveillance, and suppression of dissent that took place in the 60s? Grief at the deaths on 9/11.

 

From 9/11 to Bush to Ed Koch, I don’t believe we should never let grief blind us. When do we get to talk about a person’s mistakes, and during what time must we only talk about their successes?