Florida Is Strange

Florida is strange because so much of our population comes from someplace else.

Rare is the Floridian, seemingly, who was born within hour's drive of where they live now.

Before Florida became a destination state and God's Waiting Room it was already possessed of multiple personalities.

The Panhandle has often been referred as "South Georgia".

Tampa and Miami are distinct from The Panhandle and from each other.

The interior of the state has long been rural and agricultural, changing significantly only when some obscure guy you might have heard of started buying up land near Orlando.

As God's Waiting Room we get retirees from diverse places.  People who are living on a fixed pension from places that tax their pension checks and cost more to live in and have shitty weather.

We've gotten their kids who want to live closer to their elderly parents.

Tampa got a ton of Cubans, but a different kind of Cuban than Miami and because of different circumstances.

Many people move to Florida because it simply suited them better.  Lower taxes, lower costs of living, better weather (except for hurricanes and brutal humidity; but those aren't year-round problems).

We have the descendants of retired mafiosos.

We have old money and new.

We're diverse!

Things are strange here because of the mix and the fact that winter doesn't kill the crazies like it does up north.  We're a meme generating zone.

You've heard of Florida-Man, ever hear of Minnesota-Man?

Because of all this, our politics get downright strange and because of it things you'd think were as insane as the typical Florida-Man story are just the lay of the land.

To us it's normal.  To you it's insane.

Yet... for the most part... it's not really any worse than where you are.  It's just different.  Perhaps more open and in your face than what you're used to because we've got to hammer it out in more than one version of The American Culture to get the point across, and that means finding a common language to say it in.

A person who moved here from Detroit is not going to be reached by the same message as someone from New York.  But a politician has to say the same thing to both people the same way, or be accused of being two-faced.

Unlike many high-population states we are not dominated by a single city, though Miami and The Holy Mouse Orlando would like that to be otherwise.

What works, what doesn't and how to tell is difficult to explain to people who aren't living here.

That sounds wonderfully trite, but we don't get YOUR politics either.  Even if we started where you are.

Where else could you go from homosexuality be banned by law to a tiny, upstart pro-gun LGBT organization merging with the oldest pro-gun LGBT organization in a few years?

Where else could a Republican super-majority pass a massive anti-gun bill and then try to claim it was not.

Where else could a blogger note that the sky was not, in fact, falling because people open-carried AT the notoriously bad police of Miami-Dade be treated as if they had organized the whole thing solely to promote more gun control?