Yesterday, more specifically, Memorial Day 2023, I went to a mall in Central Florida. It was the same mall I had shopped for many a Christmas present, my shoes and accessories for prom, and what I wore to my best friend’s wedding. My mother and I decided to park near and enter the bookstore. While walking through, we see a large display of (enter Big Boi gif of “I know that ain’t who I think it is!!!”) Ron DeSantis’ latest memoir, and check this, the name of the book is, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”
Wow. Every time I think he couldn’t get any worse, he proves to me that I’m not nearly as imaginative as he is disgusting. I am not sure Ron’s target audience is the reading kind. Still, the only response to the sick irony laid before me, on a table in a bookstore I had frequented so many times before, was to take two copies of “Fahrenheit 451” and put them on top of Ron’s smug display of self-aggrandizement and pageantry of myopia and a micropenis.
Yesterday, more specifically, Memorial Day 2023, thousands of people visited Hollywood Beach, just a few short driving hours away from that same bookstore in which I stood. Some of those people did not make it home. Nine people were injured, including four children. People tweeted, regretted, and regressed back to their normal lives because what is the point of being outraged anymore? What is the point of being shocked at a mass shooting when another one will happen before the time it takes us to catch our breath after being exhausted in grief from the last one? This is the same state that ranks fourth in school shootings in the country.
If killing children does not move Republicans into action (I mean, other than clinging tightly to the wombs of women), nothing will.
Nothing will make them feel that enough has finally been enough. If the protection of children involves them not reading about historical facts versus having children enter school buildings and never coming out alive again, then we are surely doomed. While DeSantis uses children as his protective shield against the White House, he continues to disavow his racism but remains in the good graces of the racists. He continues to try to destroy everything that isn’t white male-centered and sterile.
Children knowing that different types of families exist, or a drag queen with a book could not be more harmful imagery than kids who’ve seen their classmate’s faces blown off and had to wash their friends’ blood from their weeping bodies. If attacking “the Happiest Place in the World,” a place that employs millions of Floridians, is the mecca for millions of children, and is so fantastic that he and that charlatan ass wife of his were even married there, is more important than keeping kids who are already born, alive, then surely Ron DeSantis cannot in good conscience run on a platform that he cares about children. But I guess that’s the thing about a good conscience—you usually have to be a good person to have one.
Ron DeSantis is just a bad human and has “an inclination to spend other people’s money, a lust to control the lives of their fellow citizens and a desire to perpetuate oneself in office…” These were not my words but his; DeSantis wrote this passage about Obama in his 2011 book, “Dreams From Our Founding Fathers.”
The same DeSantis that has taken retirement funds for Florida state workers and put them into low-performing private equity firms that have donated to his campaign, Mr. “anti-woke,” the same guy who got married at Disney but seems to hate the gay staff, is the despot he claims is nothing but the left.
HB543, the bill that Ron DeSantis signed that does not require a permit for a concealed carry weapon, goes into effect on July 1, 2023, just in time for the Fourth of July. Just in time for fireworks.
Just in time for someone else to not make it in time.
