Blogger Tallturtle was living in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco when Harvey Milk was assassinated thirty years ago, and he’s written a short memoir of his impressions of the incident, from his perspective as an ordinary San Franciscan of that day.

Tallturtle has a couple of observations that I hadn’t heard before:– First, that Dan White, the guy who murdered Milk and George Moscone, was fairly clueless when it came to politics, and possibly even too honest in a peculiar sense of the word:

This next part is merely my speculation. White was a political amateur. He didn’t understand how politics was played in San Francisco. He didn’t realize that as a conservative Supervisor, he was valuable to the commercial and financial elites of the city. He didn’t know there were many perfectly legal ways that rich people could reward their friends. Heck, he may not have known that these people considered him his friend….

And second, that San Franscisco of that day was not a coherent city, but rather a collection of many smaller communities that didn’t really communicate with one another. This last point leads to the moral of the story for Tallturtle — but rather than spoil the moral for you here, you should just go and read the post yourself.