To a point, this is true. Of course, right? Alabama is a poor state. It is a red state. (Is there something redder than red--say crimson?) Alabamians have a strange priority when it comes to football and church (as in these are more important than food or water). Alabamians have crappy access to quality health care (and by all accounts, dental care as well.) There doesn't seem to be, shall we say, a plague of diet and exercise. We're not necessarily the most industrious place, either, but that's not all bad.
Mostly, it's just a place of the "have-nots." And when I get down on living here, I think about it like that. When we got off the plane from Copenhagen, and looked around us, M and I were like, so this is like the OPPOSITE of Scandinavia. But that's okay, because home is where you make it and we have friends and a good life.
You know where I totally don't want to live? Florida. As I mentioned on Facebook today, Florida is literally and metaphorically the armpit of our nation. It's peninsula dangles into the Caribbean like it's trying to break off. Florida is what happens when everything goes wrong. Florida is broken, beyond repair, and it's time to admit it. Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana should no longer be the butts of American jokes. It should be Florida.
Obviously, and first off, it's apparently okay to shoot black kids in hoodies. I feel for the jurors in that horrible Zimmerman debacle: how can they deliver justice when the law in question is unjust? They weren't a bunch of racists who thought Zimmerman did the right thing. They thought he did an awful thing, but the law protected him. So, there's that about Florida. Shooting people happens a lot. I don't like shooting.
Also, the driving in Florida is awful. Time and again, national surveys tell us that driving in Florida is taking your life in your hands (because certainly those hands aren't on the wheel.) I attribute this to several factors: the elderly, those not trained to drive in the US, those not used to driving with the elderly, crappy cars that randomly break down, and an overconfidence among drivers who think that driving straight is all they have to do in Florida. It turns out, Florida's roads are only a small notch up from third world countries where like a thousand Vespas hover around the intersection and take off like angry bees when the light turns green. So you find yourself stuck on a highway behind an old person driving 35 miles under the speed limit, but you're unable to change lanes because of a paralyzing fear of being divebombed by some dude driving 90 on the same road. It's insanity.
Right? The ground actually opens up and swallows people in Florida. How hostile is that? Hurricanes, torrential rains, gator infested swamps AND man-eating earth? What the hell? It's as though the devil himself is trying to open up a portal and reclaim Florida for himself.
So, yes, the natural disaster facet of Florida is something. But the human element really kicks the natural disaster part up a notch. The hurricanes...remember Andrew and the decade of the bajillion dollar storms? How many crappy cookie cutter subdivisions have to be wiped out to ring up a tab like that? And, of course, since it's Florida, there's always some moron doing something stupid, like surfing in the hurricane. Which wouldn't be so galactically stupid, except that he couldn't swim.
The politics of Florida are a cruel joke. All of these electoral college votes in the hands of people who couldn't use a hole punch in 2000. Where the state actually legislates every man woman and child for him/herself. Remember that dangling chad asshole?
Seriously? In the 21st century our elections were counted by Mr. Magoo?
Nothing makes you stop and shake your head, though, like the "celebrities" from Florida. Those giants of literature art and film that have shaped and defined our nation:
Megan Fox, Wesley Snipes, Leighton Meester, Mandy Moore, Pat Boone, Half the Backstreet Boys, Vanilla Ice and a whole bunch of rap artists whose names are in quotation marks. Florida is not the home of ground breaking cinema or even, really any cinema at all. I suspect the only reason there are any "stars" out of Florida at all is that the most hideous of all creatures--the stage mom--spawned there. So, basically, we (meaning movie goers) pay these actors to just actually BE who they are--crappy Floridians. Yeah, somebody's going to come back to me with Johnny Depp and Daniel Tosh who are both Floridians with long standing careers and real talent. Yeah, there are 20 million people in Florida, they have to produce some quality occasionally--it's just not as often as the statistics suggest it should be.
Criminals in Florida are also a special breed--nefarious, but somehow just a little screwed up as well. Like maybe they get caught in some stupid way, or their trial was spectacularly botched, or somehow the whole thing just got to be too much for the system to bear. The Polk County cheerleaders who beat the absolute living snot out of a girl. Cheerleaders? Debra Lafave--one of those classy teachers who had sex with a 14 year old student. Casey Anthony, and of course Ted Bundy all hail from Florida, or at least did their dirty work there. Florida is where band hazing turns lethal, and college football rosters are regularly compared to prison rolls. Criminals in Florida are driven to do strange, bizarre and grotesque things. Is it living in Florida that drives them to this craziness or is it the other way--Florida attracts weirdos. And old people. Lots and lots of old people.
Florida is a hot mess. The panhandle, most generally compared to Georgia and Alabama, is a bastion of rednecks and loners who live away from civilization to work on their apocalypse bunkers or whatever. Southern Florida is a mash up of hard core Puerto Ricans and blue haired old ladies. A disconnect of screened-in patio homes and crack houses. It's like God threw up his hands and was like "I dunno where to put these people! I'll just drop them in Florida til I figure it out" but then he totally forgot to go back there. Because, let's be honest here, it sometimes seems like God forgets Florida.
Finally, there is the non-taxing philosophy that is working so well to fund all of Florida's schools and other quasi-necessities. Sure, it draws really rich former NBA stars and the uber-famous, but for what? They build their mega-mansions there to avoid paying state income tax and then they live elsewhere, because (and you may have guessed what I'm going to say here) WHO WANTS TO LIVE IN FLORIDA?
Even the manatee, Florida's state mammal, is kind of a joke in the animal kingdom. What animal lives in water so shallow you can stand in it but has no protection mechanism at all? The manatee. The sea cow. Not the sea-chimp (that'd be waay to clever) but the sea cow and its prehistoric brain and fragile skin are the inhabitants of Florida. Manatees--driven to extinction because they are simply too dumb to move outta the way.
Disney. I'm not even going to write about Disney because my vitriol for that place exceeds the limits of my ability to express them. Disney is truly proof that Florida is the bottom of the United States' bucket. As low as it goes. The gator-filled, boa constrictor infested, murky swampy bottom of the US's bucket.
No comments:
Post a Comment