Holding a Rainbow

in my hand...

Pride Flag, June 29, 2025, Key West

There are downsides to being a procrastinator that go beyond putting off your dreams and being late for doctor appointments. There’s the missing of moments that may never happen again.

Two years ago, I waited until the last minute to ride my bike into town to participate in the Rainbow Flag Parade, thinking it was like the Fantasy Fest Parade, which takes forever for floats and marchers to get down the street. Then, it was over by the time I got there at 7:25.

This year I wanted to be there since I wasn’t sure how many years we had left to celebrate gay pride or any kind of expression of tolerance and love and joy and openness that we have enjoyed here for so long. Doesn’t it fell that way, now, that what we have loved and relied on are slipping away?

And they are, even here in Paradise.

On the side streets, darkness has been encroaching on our One Human Family community. This is a city that runs on the work of immigrants keeping the machine of tourism and industry humming. Now they are being hunted.

Last week, three blocks from my house, masked thugs threw a woman into a one car and her child into another while neighbors watched, horrified. ICE agents have been nabbing people at Home Depot, our Urgent Care facility, and on my street, which many hotel workers use as a bike throughway to work and back.

And recently, they nabbed a beloved hairdresser, an Irish man who had been working diligently to push his green card through after his work visa expired. As his partner said, :”this is a law-abiding, tax-paying person who never even had a parking ticket. When the ICE agent saw the picture on his confiscated phone of his partner, a black man who the agent guessed was Haitian, he said, “Maybe we’ll go get him. Make a two for one.”

There is a meeting tonight at City Hall discussing what we can do as a city and as citizens to push back against this assault on our neighbors and friends. We’re not fools, we’re people of the sea. We know what it portends when bad clouds are gather. But we also know how to navigate and survive storms.

Part of me says, what good will it do? But another part of me, the one who knows what it feels like to hold a rainbow in my hand, says any action that can be taken should be taken. Tonight, coming together as concerned citizens and hopefully, concerned leaders is important because it still reminds us we are citizens that carry democracy in our bones.