Question -- When does fiction morph into fact? Are some topics just too dangerous to even explore through fiction?

About ten years ago, I started to write a series of initial vignets for a political thriller that I was thinking about writing. I had published on Amazon mainly novels that were linked to my days at the Pentagon in the 1970's and 80's (Rings of Armageddon), to economics and finance for a goal of describing through fiction how capitalism could be changed for the better (The Phoenix Agenda Trilogy) where the first book ends with global markets in complete collapse, the next examines the effects on the US and world economies as they fall into deep recession-depression, and the third how the world recovers and moves on with a different economic model, one based on cooperation rather than competition. I'm in the final revision stage of a fifth novel that is more science fiction mixed with historical events and people that has taken more more than fiifteen years to find the right way to close out the story and end it on a high note. So I know how to pubish something that no one will likely read, so no risk of causing a social problem if someone takes the fictional events as fact or tries to make them fact, but from the point of view of the author, it seems it is a risk. So this essay is meant to examine what the risk is and why it could happen especially if it gets a real agent and a real publisher. Of course, if there was an agent who wants to discuss representation for all of these books, I would not say no.

https://www.amazon.com/David-L-Blond/e/B00QR1B4ZQ/ref=aufs_dp_fta_dsk

Dangerous Time

We live not just, as one Chinese proverb says, in "interesting times", it seems anywhere you go you could wind up dead by some nutcase. There are no safe spaces, but up until now, the "beautiful people", the "politicians, judges, political insiders, lobbyists, etc." have been immune to the threat. But random events are just that, they can happen. The first step in this story takes place in a nice location, Potomac, Maryland, far removed from the typical places where mass murder takes place. It is a suburb of Washington where many lobbyists and high powered lawyers reside in McMansions hidden away off River Road. It is neither Republican or Democrat, the only coin of the realm here is money to buy into the country life within an hour of downtown DC, and political-economic-social power that comes from that money. Our story begins there:

June 6th, Potomac, Maryland

Senior Agent Kelly Fitzpatrick surveyed the scene with dismay.?Nineteen people ranging in age from 17 to 75 years old were lying dead, another twenty were wounded.?The shooter was dead.?Among the dead, however, were three Republican Senators and their children, and two Supreme Court justices, as well as their children.?The shooters’ identity was easily established, the motivation was not fully understood.?The young man, just 18 years old, had purchased the two AR-15’s earlier that week along with two Glock automatic handguns.?

She looked at the kidney shaped swimming pool now stained red with the blood of the two girls shot in the water. Thankfully their bodies had been removed. She had spent her entire career in in the DC area, first in Arlington, at the Field office, and now at Headquarters heading up the domestic terrorism task force.?What made this different was the location, a McMansion, in Potomac, off River Road, about ten miles from the District line, a place rarely touched by violence.?It had been a typical after graduation party for an elite private school, a mix of adults and teenagers.?What made this different were the names of the guests, all members of a special subset of Washington society, well connected lawyers, lobbyists, high government officials, and members of Congress and the judiciary.???The single parent who had?helped?organize?the gathering had not observed the carnage at the pool, a distance from his second floor, sound proof, home office, so he?had been inside the house when the shooting started.??The graduates were all from?Georgetown Prep and their parents.?The school, difficult to get in to and extremely expensive in Bethesda with its campus covered acres of manicured land outside of the city carried a stiff price tag over $ 50,000 a year.?It was exclusive and useful for networking, in some cases law firms or consulting companies paid the tuition for children of their senior managers knowing this would get them to mix with the right people.??

The families who had been milling around the pool and socializing in the garden of the house?before it turned into a crime scene. Kelly didn’t begrudge the living and the dead, in shock, sitting in the living room, some hugging their children, many were sobbing, while police and FBI agents began the process of debriefing on what happened and when.?Gather in the room were?upper middle class over achievers who went to the right schools often on scholarships, forcing their way out of the world that they had come from and into a new world filled with money, influence, and power.?They had advanced often by charm, but sometimes by being ruthless, clawing and pushing their way up the corporate ladder into the the top ranks of these DC power centers -- the law firms, consulting?and lobbying companies, or as staffers on Congressional committees. In some cases, after a time gaining contacts and experience, they might go back home and run for Congress so that they could return accumulating more power, more influence, until they left office and moved seamlessly into the ranks of Senior partners in law firms and lobbying companies.?These men and women represented the coastal meritocracy that had coalesced in around the Federal government since the end of the Second World War.??Once they had achieved success, they could, if their children chose to follow in their footsteps and had the right drive and intelligence, help them to follow the same path, but a path greased by a parents clout, friends, and networks.?It took money and access so?by sending them to the right colleges, having the best internships, and getting the right first jobs, they created a new American upper middle class, self-perpetuating.???For Kelly Fitzgerald, the first in her immediate family to graduate from college and then law school, she had received nor expected to get any help from her family.?What made this bit of mass murder different from the two others that had happened within a space of less than a week in other parts of the country, were the names of the victims.?

?There was a bit of irony too for the host of the gathering ran a major lobbying firm and his main client was the gun lobby and the NRA.?On the wall of his study were signed pictures of him with Presidents, Senators, as well as CEOs of the major weapons companies.?In a small, vault like room, off to one side he stored his own arsenal, protection, he believed, for Armageddon that was coming.

“Fitzgerald look at this,” one of the young agents called in to help with the identification and the cataloguing of witness statements said hurrying up to her holding a blood stained paper.?“This was on the shooter, in his pocket.”?

She took the paper and read it.??Suddenly a normal, mass shooting, one of the three that week occurring all over the United States of America, the country with the proudest tradition of gun ownership, that right, protected by some, in her eyes, inane rulings of the Federal Court, including the Supreme Court, was something a bit more.

“Does this mean what I think it means?”?She asked.

“I believe so.”

There were only two words on the paper.?They had meaning by their implication, and from the dead Senators and Justices of the Supreme Court scattered around the pool and garden, the meaning was clear.?On the Internet, starting a few weeks ago, the posts calling for real gun control often ended with the threat that this country needed a ‘Clean Sweep’ of the governing class to solve the problems caused by political malpractice, gerrymandering, and the willingness of the Supreme Court to ignore these problems and if anything through their rulings make it easier to do or stop useful laws that might make the country safe from military style assault rifles.?

“The two justices who were shot then might be targeted along with the Senators not just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because who they were and what they had done or not done,” she said saying what others will say once they digest this carnage for what it was, a political act, not the senseless act of a disgruntled ex-student, employee, or criminal.

“Do we know the connection with the shooter?” she asked.

“Wasn’t allowed to graduate due to owing money to the school after his father’s untimely death and the families bankruptcy.?He wasn’t on the guest list, but kids were arriving and leaving all night, it was a kind of wild scene.”

“The owner of the house,” she asked.

“Senior partner in Hogan and Hartley Public Affairs, a lobbying firm with ties to the gun lobby and of course to the Republican Party.?Two of the Senators were invited as guests of Tom Hogan, just happened to be there, had no children in this year’s graduating class. “

“Hogan did he survive.”

“Yes, but his 16-year-old son and 18-year-old daughter, she had graduated earlier that day, didn’t.”

Kelly went into the house where a few of the guests were being treated for physical injuries, the ones that needed hospitalization had already been ambulanced to nearby hospitals, it was also likely that given the elite status of these victims, rather than the normal families impacted by mass shootings, that they would suffer from PTSD for their safe, cozy world, far from the inner-city violence, now had been violated.?

She found Hogan in the study staring at the wall of pictures and citations, political emblems of his success.?His company had a role, along with others, in stopping useful legislation on guns, cigarettes, environmental regulations, a nationwide right to a legal, safe abortion, and efforts by the Democrats to codifying the rights of transgender people and their parents.?One of the pictures or citations had been removed from the wall, and as Kelly entered the room, she heard pounding.?Coming closer to where he sat at his desk, she saw what he was trying to destroy with?his fist the picture showing him smiling with the President of the NRA accepting their A+ rating when he was a Congressman, before retiring to the more lucrative profession of lobbyist.

“I know this isn’t a good time, Mr. Hogan, but I need a full list of who was invited to the party.”

Tom Hogan kept pounding the glass, the blood pouring out of the cuts on his fist, ignoring her.?She turned and went back out of the room.

“Evans,” she shouted to the youngest agent in the room, “get the paramedics into that room and stop him from self-harming.”

Before Evans could act, she heard the shot.?Single shot, silence, could only mean one thing.?She turned around and raced back down the hallway to the study, found Hogan lying dead, his nose pressed against the broken glass of the NRA Award, the run in his right hand.??Hogan’s wife had died ten years before and he was still single.?

After writing that a few years back, I stopped writing. The concept of Clean Sweep worried me. The young man in the first incident was of the type that usually commits this kind of mass murder, but the location and the collateral damage was the point. What made this scary was the slip of paper he had in his pocket with two words, Clean Sweep. The victims of gun violence were friends of the man whose house the party was at, the lobbyist for the guns, and the Senators and Justices of the Supreme Court who were gathered there for the after graduation party, were responsible for the lax laws. My next incident reported a few days after the June massacre at Potomac was overtly political and well planned. It seemed to me I was delving into a dark area where the randomness of the reported deaths and in this case, the real time video, like a reality show, of the hunt on the boat where the meeting was being held, became more obvious and clear in the incident at St. Michaels.

June 8, St. Michaels, Maryland

The view from the deck of the Lady Helene, the private yacht owned by Robert Graham, the publishing heir, was beautiful.?Kelly stood for a moment before returning to the crime scene just below.??The Chesapeake Bay Bridge was just visible from where the boat was docked, the waters calm, the sunset far to the West, beautiful.??The carnage was as great or greater than that at the Hogan house where she’d been the day earlier.?Military style assault weapons leave little to the imagination, but the men and two women in the ballroom on the ship, were all wearing name tags making it easy to identify who they were and what companies or parts of the right of center establishment they represented.??One more Supreme Court justice was there, along with two more Senators, and three Congressmen, including Holden Ames who was rumored to be about the challenge the current Republican Speaker of the House for his job when Congress convened again at the end of the summer. The loss of three Congressmen here might make that majority just one Representative, an impossible majority to maintain and control.?

The names of the other dead were being tabulated but death would come suddenly to some of the richest, politically connected families?in the country, and for a while the GOP would be without leadership for the?Chairman of the Republican National Committee lay dead along with her possible successor. Unlike the Potomac violence, this one was very systematic, very political, and for that reason it was far more dangerous to the wellbeing of the country at this time of great political, social, and economic divisions.?

“Where’s the crew?” Kelly asked the first agent who had been?dropped with two Coast Guard personnel by helicopter onto the deck of the ship after it was spotted traveling in a busy shipping lane,?in circles,?in the Bay just off St. Michaels.?The small village of St. Michaels served the needs of the large estates that clustered around town.?Isolated enough form Washington, across the Bay from Annapolis, it was best reached by helicopter that only the richest inhabitants could afford, thus it was expensive and exclusive.

“They were put off and the Coast Guard just found them about fifteen miles offshore in a rubber dinghy,?handcuffed and gagged,?but sitting quietly.?The cutter is flying them to St. Michaels, and they should be here in about a half an hour.?You need to see this.”?

She followed the man, stepping over one of the bodies, a woman still wearing her diamonds and dressed for dinner, into the main public room of the ship.?A projector had been set up and it was attached to a computer and the slides that were being shown were on rotation.??The slides seemed to be the GOP program for when the Congress reconvened at the end of the summer.?It was, as she watched it flip through each full of Sturm and fury, political rhetoric, but without much possibility of being enacted either by the House, with their narrow majority, the Senate where the two Parties were?evenly split, and?getting a Presidential signature on an agenda that would reverse the hard won legislative victories he had had in the Congress before the mid-terms changed the balance in the House from D to R.?But the last slide, with a different font must have been?a new addition and it scared the shit out of her, it said?“Clean Sweep” in 36 point type.?The same words that the boy in Potomac had on a folded paper in his pocket before taking his own life.

Kelly now counted the political toll of the last two days – three Supreme Court justices, five senators, three Representatives including the House Whip, third in line after the Speaker and Majority leader.?The dead also included the?the Chairman of?the Republican Party, the entire Board of Directors made up of?some of the richest, most politically active, men who raised the bulk of the money for right of center and far right members of Congress and candidates all in the name of building a Congress friendly to their interests.

“We found the shooter,” one of the other Agents said as she walked through the room.?“Died of a single gunshot to the head, likely self-inflicted.”

“How old?”

“By his looks, about seventy, less by a few years, but old, not young, at least, so that’s different.”

The phone rang.?She ignored it, and instead walked through the ship until she came to the upper deck and the controls for the vessel.?She noted the rope that had held the rudder slightly to the right that left the boat turning in a wide circle until someone noticed that it was moving too close to shore.?

“Boss, Director wants to talk to you.”

“Answer the God damn phone when I call,” Jim Jordan, the Acting Director of the Bureau shouted as Kelly put the phone up to her ear.?

“Sorry,” she answered distracted by the blood on the deck that she almost slipped on.?She stepped over one of the bodies, another well-dressed, middle aged, woman wearing her Republican red vest.?Against the wall, likely blown off her head, was one of the last President’s MAGA hats in bright red with white letters.?

“How many dead?” the Director asked.

“Hard to say, another Supreme Court justice, two more Senators, and three Congressmen, plus about five members of the RNC including the Head, Rhonda Phillips, that makes eleven all together, and of course the shooter, an older man, late seventies by the looks of it, no identification.”

“Okay, keep this quiet for now, we have enough problems with the Potomac shit show.?Turn over the clean-up of this to Meyerson when he gets there, and then get your ass back to Headquarters once he lands by the copter.”

“One more??thing,” Kelly thought to tell him, “the last slide showing when we got on board had in bold letters the same hash tag as the shooter had on his person at Potomac, #Clean Sweep.”

?

Jordan put down the phone trying to decide what was fact and what was supposition.?There was a clear chain of command for this kind of thing.?First, he had to inform the Attorney General, if he could find him on the weekend, and let him inform the President.?The idea that this act was not just a random event, but a planned assassination, political violence with a goal in mind.?Given the targets, then he believed it must be guns, the easy availability to almost anyone.?If this were the case then the potential for civil violence, fighting between left and right with ordinary people caught in the crossfire was high.?Never in less than two days did so much change so fast.?It was dangerous to have an R after your name or frequent social gatherings and meetings where similar minded people congregated.???The choice of a pool party of a lobbyist catering to the NRA as well as other right-wing causes was not an accident or was it.?What was scary for the DC crowd, of which he was a member, was that the victims were not faceless, poor, non-entities, just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, or members of gangs fighting for turf in the Hood, but Senators, Congressmen, and Justices of the Supreme Court.?It was the same crowd of politicians and judges who seemed to imagine guns as some abstract concept enshrined through the Supreme Court’s flawed, in his mind, ruling on what the Founding Fathers meant by a well-regulated militia that indirectly led to the mass killings of the past week.?This was now, with the deaths on the boat in St. Michaels, a political act, and for that reason alone, it was frightening because there were far more guns in people’s home arsenals than there were people in this country and a full-scale war between the left and the right would destroy a country already polarized and deeply distrustful.??The very make-up of the?Congress had been changed with the deaths in St. Michaels.?And yet any effort he might make to pro-actively boost protection for the remaining Justices of the court or Congressmen would be seen as an acknowledgement that something was going seriously wrong within the ruling class so that they, not just Gays at a nightclub, or Hispanics at a mall, were now the victims of guns.?

Suddenly the story began to take shape as not just a description of today's American reality, but now there was planning and purpose to the carnages. With the normal response of the far right, the victims in this second incident, to see this as the opening salvos of the war between the woke and anti-woke, between liberals and conservatives, Republicans or Democrats.

Once the Republican opposition to meaningful gun control and other progressive programs was explored, then the story takes on the purveyor of the efforts to block any laws designed to reduce gun violence, the NRA.

June 9th, NRA Headquarters, 2nd Amendment Plaza, Washington, D.C.

?

?The Board of the National Rifle Administration took their seats around the polished rosewood conference table while the President called the meeting to order.?The prior weeks mass murders had shaken the confidence of the members as they looked towards the heavy glass doors and the nearly all glass that surrounded the Board’s meeting room.?The room was on the top floor of the six story building in downtown Washington.?Outside there were armed guards patrolling the hallway.?It was probably the safest meeting room outside of some of the more well protected conference rooms at the State Department, the White House, or the CIA.?Since the assassinations in Potomac and St. Michaels, the Board of the NRA had ordered increased security at its headquarters.?Anyone entering the building was searched for weapons with the only exceptions being members of the Board who very publicly had come bearing arms, a proud tradition of the NRA, whose motto was that a good guy well armed could not be prey for the mentally disturbed and left leaning young men who caused most of these massacres of innocent civilians.?

Not every member of the twenty-two person Board came with a weapon in hand, but enough were armed to defend against any attack.?The President of the NRA for this period was a former member of the Freedom Caucus who had lost his bid for reelection in the last cycle.?He walked into the meeting with an AR-16 strapped to his back.?Before entering the conference room, he spoke to the reporters gathered just outside of the building about the events of the previous few days.

“We are not afraid; we will never give in to these threats against our God given right to bear arms in defense of our persons and others.?As you can see, I’ve come armed to the teeth.”?He smiled and waved the military grade weapon he was carrying into the room.?“We are not afraid.

The smell of smoke came first, then the fire alarm in the building announced a fire.?Inside the Board room, the men and two women, stood up, leaving behind the single page agenda prepared for this meeting.

A couple of staffers were waiting just outside the door of the Board room and ushered the people in the room towards the fire exit at the end of the room.?The smell of acrid smoke filled the air, the visibility was low, and while the members of the Board were not in full panic mode, they were pushing each other to hurry.?

“Fire’s below us” one of the staffers said, “so we go up and to the roof where they can rescue us easily.”

There was no dissent and the members of the Board happily walked up the two floors to the roof.?The air outside was clear, the sun was shining.?They could hear the copter coming nearer.?Everything would be okay, Tom Rawlsian, the new President of the NRA thought, as he gathered everyone in the open space.?What he noticed first, however, was the silence below, the absence of truck noises, sirens, nothing.?The two young staffers, who he had not recognized, had disappeared.?He walked back towards the door leading into the building, he tried it, it was locked.?The twenty-two members of the Board were milling around as he fumbled for his phone, but he had no phone, none of them had, a precaution to stop anyone recording what was said at the meeting.?The sound of the copter was getting closer, then it was overhead.?

The image that the Director of the FBI watched was almost movie quality.?The ?massacre of the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association, in real time, in living color was methodical.?On the copter there was just two people, the pilot and an older man.?His two girls and his wife had died in the El Paso shopping center massacre and he had never gotten over that loss.?The pilot was his daughter’s husband who had flown Apache helicopters in Afghanistan.?The members of the NRA Board were huddled by the locked door leading off the roof when he opened fire, only two of the assembled twenty, fired, the rest having left their weapons by the side of the door when they entered the room.?The camera in the copter recorded everything in real time and sent it to the Internet for distribution.?A live feed was posted on the NRA’s own website as well as that of the Republican National Committee’s site. When the last NRA Board member was lying in his own blood, the image changed to that of the words “Clean Sweep”.?Then the copter rose, high over the top of the building, and the pilot cut the engine and allowed it to plumet to the roof, ?where it burst into flames and incinerated the entire top of the building.?The fire spread quickly to the floors below and before the fire engines could reach the scene, the entire structure was burning.?The NRA had not trusted off site storage of records.?The heat from the fire was so intense that the computer servers and storage fused leaving the NRA with almost no centralized record of membership.??Of greater interest to the public was that ammunition stored secretly in quantity on the top floor of the Headquarters.?When the heat of the blaze started the shells to fire off, the three local fire companies decided to pull their men back and lease the building to burn and explode until it was a total loss.

The pilot of the copter usually did traffic reports for one of the DC news stations so the direct to internet feeds were simple to do, and the high definition cameras were already there.?At least two members of the Board had mocked the father’s anger at the senseless death of his daughter when an 18 year old boy had opened fire in the school where she worked.?The Board member had explained that it wasn’t guns that were the problem, it was?people, and if more teachers had guns at hand, then this crazy would have been dead and not his daughter.??

As I wrote more, as more things that upset me and others about what was happening especially in the States controlled by the Repubicans using their majorities often accumulated through gerrymandering of leglisative boundaries, I would add another few of these just to test out different ideas, moving deeper and deeper into my worries about what this might go and if this should ever see the light of day, much less in print, and yet it was a story that lots of people were prepared to believe could happen.

There are a few more vignets, but then I wrote what I think was the most creative of the ones so far. It is a story that I call and was called after it ended "The Hand of God Speech" and it helped many former non-believers in the spirit of the Lord to suddenly believe.

October 1st,Redondo Beach, Florida,

In future years it would be called the ‘Hand of God’ speech and would be studied from the point of view of politics, religion, and metaphysics.?As the Deputy Director watched it in his office with Agent Kelly Fitzgerald and some others on the Special Taskforce set up after so many random, but linked, assassinations, this act of violence and destruction, was Biblical in nature and confirmation that there was a God and he cared about the human race. ?The speech was live through the wonders of the Internet fueled by the Governor of Florida’s hunger for attention as the start of his Anti-woke Crusade, as he had billed his candidacy for the Presidency against the master of anti-woke politics, the former President King.?He was running on an anti-woke and own the libs platform that promoted a national abortion ban, cancelling the current set of initiatives to electrify the nation’s roads by installing charging stations and encouraging the phasing out of fossil fuels, laws to make helping children find their true identities, efforts to make doctors think twice about helping someone with a problem pregnancy because it might force them to abort a potentially healthy fetus to save the life of a pregnant woman and they would find themselves caught up in litigation, and even his anti-corporate message that it is the State, not the companies, that should opine on social issues and not criticize State laws that are not business related.?He wanted to make the entire country live within the straight jacket form banning books in the name of parental rights to slowing initiatives designed to phase out fossil fuel burning in the name of climate change out of a deference to the possible negative effects on companies bottom lines.??

He’d chosen a very friendly audience, the Republican conference of the Florida legislature meeting.?The House has a total of 120 seats of which 83 were held by the Republicans and 40 seats in the Senate of which they held 32 allowing them to pass almost anything the Governor wanted in his crusade against Disney, the largest employer in the State and the source of much of its rapid economic growth when they objected to his anti-woke agenda and its treatment of gay, lesbian and transgender people.?????He had managed to drive through bills that would have been called fascist with nary an objection from his docile Republican colleagues and now at the annual Republican legislative retreat in Redondo Beach, in the panhandle, he was laying out his agenda for running for President in next year’s primaries.?Every member of the Republican controlled legislature was there, all the officials of the GOP in the State, as well as the Republican members of the State Supreme Court were in the auditorium, newly rebuilt after a hurricane that had devastated the Panhandle several?years before, a freak, or so the States head in the sand legislators said, once in a century form that a few years later destroyed Sanibel Island and Fort Meyers.?Climate denial was a mantra of the right wing of the Republican Party, akin to being anti-Gay, anti-Obama care, anti-gun control,?or anything else in the Woke agenda. ???He’d built the Center with infrastructure money from the Federal Government which not a single Republican member of the House of Representatives had voted for.?That, the Governor thought, as he walked into the massive space inside the glass ceiling auditorium, that was ironic for you.

Kelly watched, along with the others, the version of the speech that had first been showing in real time as the address, what he had billed in advance, his opening salvo in his national war on ‘woke’ in a preview to his major donors and that he’d advertised heavily on Truth Social and Facebook.?The Governor, not a great speaker, but effective especially with his true believers, started down a long list of things that he had forced through the Florida legislature in what he was billing proudly as his “Anti-Woke” agenda from making it harder for transgender youth to get gender affirming care, to making it a crime for anyone to use a public bathroom that is not designated for the sex of their birth, to his anti-immigrant caravans and bills to make life difficult for these marginalized men, women, and children in the State.?As he rattled off each of these, he listened to the applause of his audience, fully in his corner.?The clapping grew louder when he explained how he was beating the Mouse into submission by his assault on their special tax zone, then he ?turned to the national agenda that he would pursue if he were elected President, the woke agenda that placed slowing the growth of carbon burned in power plants and automobiles, to his climate change initiatives to install charging stations all over the country in the name of reducing inflation, he drew laughter.?It was the part of his speech with the lines he had added at the last minute that everyone could quote “And so to?you, Mother Nature, I say, bring it on, we can deal with anything that you can send our way—rain, wind, storm surge, and 100 degree days--after all the summers in Florida are always hot, we’re tough, we can survive everything that you can send our way, and so I say, once again Bring It On!”?

It was at this exact moment that the sky fell in on the Governor and three quarters of the Republicans in the State legislature, as well as the Lieutenant governor, the Chairman of the GOP, and three of the representatives to the US House and one Senator.?The sound was deafening, like a freight train, and the video feed stayed live, tumbled as the stationary camera was tossed and turned before cutting off.?The newly built, to Florida standards that were supposed to be storm proof but had been gutted by the Legislature in order to speed up new building along the coasts after the last hurricane, collapsed in on itself.?Of the more than 200 people in the hall at the time, only about thirty escaped not badly injured, about 130 died immediately, including the Governor when the glass roof fell in on him as he was looking up, by the angle of his head, or what was left of it from the shards of razor sharp glass, and forty were seriously injured and of these about fifteen died within three months. ?In a single moment in time, the entire Republican leadership of the State of Florida had been, for all intents and purposes, wiped out leaving a Democratic majority.?The first task of that body, as detailed in the Constitution, was to replace the Governor with the Agricultural Secretary, a Democrat, due to the deaths of the Lieutenant Governor, the Speaker of the House, and the Chief Financial Officer in the State. ?The second task was to pass a resolution to before the next election for the replacement of the dead and badly injured Senators and Representatives, to create a Commission to straighten out the legislative and Senatorial districts, as well as the Congressional boundaries in a way designed to level the playing field for both parties. More importantly, it changed the perception that God had not been noticing the way one group of people, one political philosophy, was cavalier with the natural world, people flocked to the churches and prayed for forgiveness, pledging to be good shepherds of the planet in the name the Lord, and for a few, to reject the anti-Woke agenda of the GOP for something more moderate, forward thinking and attune with Jesus’s words to help the needy and protect the innocent, to treat enemies as friends in the name of Christian, human comity.?

Question -- Should I complete this story to its bitter end, or just let it die a natural death, also some ideas on how this all ends -- civil war along ideological and religious fault lines or in a new balance and harmony in politics and civili society?

Everyone is welcome to make a suggestion, send me a message.