This one is a short update to a previous piece I felt compelled to share.

Just over a year ago, in such an uncanny way, I posted a piece I wrote called Pt. 2 | Hidden Histories of the Holocaust. It wasn't intended as an insightful piece, but simply an urging to watch the movie Cabaret starring Liza Minnelli and Michael York. I was trying to introduce readers to some of the history of queer people under the Nazi regime, while also comparing it to the new regime that the US had just installed, all as part of Holocaust Remembrance.

In the post, I posted a link to a performance of Cabaret from the late Catherine O'Hara and the rest of the cast of Schitt's Creek. I will forever be grateful for O'Hara's performance in Schitt's Creek as a mother who loves her queer child without reservation and without hesitation. Something we don't experience frequently in life or in art and media. But this isn't why I'm sharing this.

This would be eerie enough, but a reader and friend who I had urged to watch Cabaret back at that time reached out to me this morning to share the news that the president had shared a post on his social media featuring the Obamas as apes. The racist history and connotations need no reminding here, I'm sure.

But what struck my friend was how eerily similar it felt to one of the climactic moments of Cabaret, in which Jews are represented as apes during a performance at the club. By this point, the club's clientele has been completely replaced by Nazis who laugh as they watch the scene unfold.

It's so uncanny to see the resemblances between that scene and the video shared by the president. Although, we've been say this the entire time about how the current regime resembles the Nazis.

Because they are Nazis.

A reminder that Cabaret serves to show the beginning stages of Nazism's takeover in Germany. And the timeline seems to fit about the same.

I also read that the US admits to holding about 70,000 immigrants in custody, and they are looking to build new concentration "facilities" that are designed to hold 8,000 people, which they already plan to overfill to 10,000. Multiple facilities such as this. Currently the largest prison in the US holds about 4,000 people, I also read. Towns aren't even made aware of plans for these facilities, they just find that the land has been bought by ICE or CBP, such that the towns are worried the concentration camps will deplete the water supplies, to say the very least of their concerns.

Again, these timelines are uncanny.

I would urge you again to watch Cabaret, but honestly, the biggest reasons I urged you to watch it a year ago were as warnings for what would unfold, and indeed it has already unfolded, as you were warned, not just by me, or by the film, but by countless people shouting that this is what will happen, even before the last election. Long before. At this point in the real life story, the real-life writer and main character was already fleeing Germany.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you're not actively resisting already, what is it going to take for you to do so? When will enough be enough?

no ends, only means