The Lilac People

by Milo Todd

When people hurt bad enough, they’ll grab any idea to make their own lives better, no matter how illogical.

“They’re pandering to the people who were already hateful and looking for reason and protection to be so.

“If it helps, I believe everyone is acting in one way or another in this world. We’re all afraid to be ourselves. And the saddest part is that fear is unnecessarily genuine.”

“Survival means nothing, Bertie. Just like death means nothing. To die doesn’t mean that one has given up or quit or wasn’t strong enough. To survive doesn’t mean one is smarter or better or stronger. It’s neither fate nor luck. All it is, is horrible.”

Anger is not bad. Anger is how we tell ourselves that we’ve been wronged, that we’ve been mistreated, and that it’s not okay. Anger is a beautiful emotion. We just need to express it properly.” She pressed her finger down on a random key. “In music, we call it passion.”

And when a person encourages the suffering of another, you can bet they won’t stop there. They want to see it because they hope it will fill the emptiness inside themselves, but it won’t, because it never does, and so they’ll look for the next one, and the next one, and the one after that.”

They look for the first domino to knock down, the one people will give the least resistance to, the one they care about the least. And once they’ve done it, it might be too late for everyone else.”

He understood what Doktor Hirschfeld was trying to do, for the only true way to gain rights was to show you existed. To create outreach and educate the public, to build awareness. But by showing they existed, not yet gaining the rights to back them up, they had made themselves targets. Visibility without protection only encouraged violence.

“I’ve realized that the mind can do only two things: make us happy and keep us safe. But it can’t do both at the same time.”

Pride in a country was for what it could do for its people, not what it could take away.