Still Holding Vigil: Week ending October 18, 2026
Sometimes I wish I could focus on this more and get these out more than once a week. A lot happened this week. A lot of depressing and scary thing happened this week.
Still, I found hope in the simplest action of just showing up.
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington DC in February of 1968.
Table of Contents
Finite
Disappointment
A Soviet Dictator and the President
This isn't a Florida specific thing, though live in South Florida long enough and you see connections, Finite Disappointment this week needs spend time on Russia. Honestly, the news about the Presidents of the former Soviet Union and the United States paling around is the most important news of the week, if not the year.
Maybe the 21st century–I'm not being hyperbolic.
While the Soviet Union is long dissolved, love for it moved back into the Kremlin in 2000, when Putin took over. Vladimir Putin, the KGB psyops officer turned mayor of Moscow turned President of Russia has openly pined for the good old days of the Soviet Union. In 2005 Putin lamented the fall of the Soviet Union, a murderous state that butchered tens of millions of its own people, as a "genuine tragedy."
Seriously, current estimates of the deaths caused by Stalin to be in excess of 60 million.
Last year, when Vladimir Putin received a red carpet welcome while visiting Alaska despite being wanted for crimes against humanity and thus subject to immediate arrest. Putin's Foreign Minister walked the red carpet in a t-shirt. The t-shirt said "CCCP" the letters of the USSR in Russian.
Now the President of the United States is defying congress to cozy up to a Soviet, er, Russian Dictator, which much of the mainstream media seems to think is not newsworthy.
Heather Cox Richardson has a solid breakdown of it that begins:
Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.
The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.
A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.
After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin is, in my opinion, not only dangerous, but he's likely insane. I'm serious. And corrupt.
You know how that invasion of Ukraine was supposed to take only four weeks but then its years in? Why did it fail? While all due respect is owed the Ukrainian people for standing up to Putin, Putin's attack failed because Putin and pals had stolen so much money from the Russian military they didn't do proper maintenance on their supply vehicles nor did they do a routine inspection before heading off to Ukraine.
And when they did get around to putting new tires on their vehicles they bought the cheapest ones they could–from China no less (the third side of the meeting Trump and Putin want to decide the fate of Ukraine)–so they could pocket the difference.
The tires on their trucks rotted off.
That's who our President is cozying up to. A guy who does an illegal invasion of a neighbor before he even bothers to check if all of the stealing he has done impeded his military.
Florida
Gonna Florida
The prayer vigil I attended across from the Baker Correctional Facility repurposed as Deportation Depot met at the Olustee Battlefield across the street.
I know it is hard to read but the engraving on the monument to the great Confederate victory at Olustee reads:
"The Battle of Olustee was fought on this ground on February 20, 1864 between 5,000 Confederate Troops commanded by Joseph E. Finnegan and 5,000 Federal Troops under Truman Seymour. The Federals were defeated with a loss of 2,000 men. The Confederate loss was less than 1,000."
The monument to the great Confederate victory was rededicated in 1994. Another stone monument on the ground states that this battle prevented another invasion like Sherman's March to the Sea, a reference to William T. Sherman's infamous chain of war crimes through the South.
What you won't learn on a visit to this battleground is that this great battle was actually an ambush, which is fair in war. A column of American troops was marching west from Jacksonville towards Tallahassee along a railroad track. At this site the Confederates had erected fortifications complete with canons. The Union soldiers didn't realize their danger until the canons opened up on them, devastating the front lines of the column.
You won't learn at the site other things, like the battalions at the head of the column were new white recruits who had never seen battle from the 7th New Hampshire and the 7th Connecticut, which is pertinent because there were at least two battle tested Black battalions behind them, including the famous Massachusetts 54, which was arguably the most famous battalion in the entire war at that point and was featured in the 1989 movie Glory, for which Denzel Washington won his first Oscar.
By 1864 the Massachusetts 54th, which had fully recovered after the Battle of Fort Wagner, had earned the nickname "Swamp Angels," which almost sounds like an insult until you realize it was because they earned it after an insane march through South Carolina swamps to save a white battalion–and Swamp Angel in the Civil War was a reference to one of the biggest, most deadly artillery pieces of the war.
As the white American troops at the front retreated the Massachusetts 54th raced forward to rescue their fellow American soldiers as the decimated battalion at the front screamed that they should retreat.
While the American troops suffered thousands of casualties in what was one of the most deadly per capita battles of the war for the US forces, the heroism of the Massachusetts 54th saved countless lives.
For their sacrifice, members of the famous battalion that were captured by the Confederates were summarily executed and buried in a mass grave–both actions were criminal offenses, war crimes, even by the standards of the time.
That's not something you'd learn at Olustee Battlefield either.
This site is literally the first historic marker in Florida. It was rededicated in 1994. It is paying homage, not to a battle, but to white washed war crimes.*
*The legal codification of War Crimes in the United States actually originates from the American Civil War as American scholars and leaders tried to grapple with what the Confederate States of America were doing. A man named Franz Lieber, himself a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, was an academic at the College of South Carolina when Lincoln issued The General Orders No. 100: Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field, which were penned by Leiber and commonly referred to as the Leiber Code.
Historic
Interlude
The Florida Gonna Florida section, again, has history for this week.
Infinite
Hope
On Saturday I had the privilege of covering the prayer vigil outside of the so-called Deportation Depot housed in the remains of the shuttered Baker Correctional Institution. Located at the closed facility likely due to proximity to a regional airport, the facility serves the same function as the former Soft-Sided Detention Facility South, aka Alligator Alcatraz, with one notable difference: you can see into the gates of this facility.
The picture at the top of this week's post is of some of the detainees waving to the prayer vigil participants on Saturday. The organizer of the event told me she's taken calls from detainees detailing horrifying conditions.
The men inside have three working showers with no curtains while half or more of the guards are women. The bathrooms offer no privacy. Men who can't handle the fire ant infestation are taken to the solitary confinement section of the prison where they sleep on floors with their faces to the door in hopes of catching fresh air. The ham comes in various shades of green. The guards, when told of rodents who are undeterred by humans often scream and run for help at the sight of the four legged vermin.
So why is this in the Infinite Hope section? Because the people outside of the gates, the people at the vigils, bring hope with them. The men whistle and cheer at the sight of the vigils–it is heartbreaking but also motivating. The men feel hope simply by the mere presence of people who care to witness what they are experiencing.
I'm putting the people who make vigil outside of this place in my Infinite Hope section because that is what they are all about.
More pictures from the vigil in the link below.
Philip Cardella
Bear
The History Hound Finds
Meta (Facebook Instagram) appears to be trying to help autocrats
Sanya Mansoor
Heather Cox Richardson
An 18th century restaurant just got some love
What's the worst that can happen this election?
Will Bunch
Why the worst isn't likely to happen
Daniel W. Drezner
Local Miami efforts to do good make national news
Sara Sneath
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