You said your lines, took a bow — your part, you thought, finished, the play, you figured, done. Such a blessing, the ramp to Freedom. Such a blessing, California Dreamin’. That’s when he tells you: “Stay. Here. Please.” You love him. He loves Miami. So…you sway on Santis strings as neighbors dance before der King; whisper nothing, take your cake (strudel, like the children say); booze your man in darkened car, hide deine fury, hide deine scar — while Panhandlers ban your books take your wage choke your heart burn your page — Are you listening, Brother? It's not metaphor. They want you dead. That’s the plan. Forgotten ash in gottes cleansed sky. It’s time to leave the SunShineStaat. Escape. Please. Take your love and run now. Now. It’s not going to get any better.
*
“If it means ‘erasing a community’ because [they] have to target children – then, damn right, we ought to do it!”
— Florida Republican Representative Randy Fine
“Our terrorist enemies hate homosexuals more than we do.”
— Florida Republican Representative Jeff Holcomb
“Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy.’ For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal.”
— Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
G Beckman 