Sometimes just shaking my head is not enough to carry on with my day and erase all recollection of a ludicrous, insulting act. Anti-Wokeism has become more zealous and outrageous than any current notion of Wokeism. If you want to see red, read this news item on The Advocate’s website. The rainbow crosswalk at the site of Orlando nightclub Pulse has gone black for the second time in a week. It’s now being guarded by Florida Department of Transportation employees. Apparently, the National Guard was unavailable.
Pulse, you will recall, is where a gunman murdered forty-nine clubgoers on June 12, 2016, most of them Latino and/or queer.
This is clearly no ordinary rainbow crosswalk. Florida has been painting over other such crosswalks in places like Miami and Delray Beach, calling such installations a political act and a safety risk. (Safety risk? WTF?!)
The Orlando crosswalk serves, in part, as a memorial. It was approved by the Florida Legislature and then-Republican governor Rick Scott. Current Republican governor Ron DeSantis even posed for a photo op at the site in 2019 before Anti-Wokeism became a Republican obsession. This is nothing short of a deplorable act in Florida’s ongoing Don’t Say Gay attempts to rewrite reality.
The families of those that died at Pulse and the people who survived deserve better. The LGBTQ community deserves better. Florida deserves better. I hope residents continue to repaint the crosswalk in rainbow hues. To blacken the road again only takes a horrendous hate crime and covers all memory of it with more hate.
Outrageous.
