If I may go on a pissy little vent for a moment, I am really fucking tired of other Americans acting like Florida has already fallen totally to fascism, there are no Floridian leftists, and Florida can just be written off entirely as a "lost cause."
There are Black and brown and indigenous and Jewish and queer and disabled and countless otherwise marginalized Floridians, all fighting tooth and nail for our home and community. But everyone acts like we don't matter or should "just leave."
And it makes me so tired, y'all. I LOVE Florida. I love its people and its environments so, so fucking much. I want better for my beloved home, and I want people to stop treating it as a fucking joke.
I want people to stop acting like there's nothing here to love and protect. Your "Florida is a nasty swamp full of Republican rednecks and crazy Florida Men" stereotyping is HURTING PEOPLE. Do better!
Profoundly strange to me that there are people whose reaction to this post has been to call me a stupid liberal who doesn't know anything about the state of trans rights in Florida.
I am a loud & proud union organizer and a disabled trans person, which is fairly obvious from about three seconds spent on my blog. When I say that there are marginalized people here who are fighting tooth and nail, I'm not just blowing smoke up your ass. I am talking about myself, my friends, and my community.
We're going to keep fighting, regardless of whether you think we're stupid for doing so.
*grabs people by the shoulders*
If you leave a comment on this post about how climate change is inevitable and we can't stop Florida from sinking into the swamp, I am going to come to your house and force you to read all of the climate activism news reports I am subscribed to. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
People are fighting. People are helping each other. People are trying to preserve the vital and unique ecosystems of this state.
If you can't see it, you need to fucking look harder, because plenty of people love this place and are giving EVERYTHING to protect it.
Go subscribe to the Earth to Florida newsletter. Read the back issues and catch up on what Florida environmental activists are doing. Look at all the ways to get involved. Then do some of them, and shut the fuck up with your ecofascist doomerism.
I spent ten years living out-of-state. The day we moved back to Florida, once we finished unloading all the moving boxes from the Uhaul, I got overwhelmed and broke down sobbing because I looked at a lizard on a palm tree for too long and couldn't stop thinking about how good it was to finally be Home.
I. Love. Florida.
It is beautiful. It is full of life, and love, and communities that are fighting tooth and nail to fix the problems hurting us. It is our home. If you can't respect that, shut up and block me instead of ranting in my notes about how stupid I am. Thanks.
This applies to the entire South, honestly. People in more privileged areas will see white supremacists violently oppressing visible minorities, then just... pretend the minorities don't exist? Or even worse, say that everybody here that's oppressed should just move somewhere else? As if economic oppression and disenfranchisement doesn't exist? And even if it didn't, their argument would still equate to saying any marginalized community should uproot their entire lives and give the oppressors what they want by leaving.
And then they'll hold up New York City as a shining example of diversity and talk about how it has the highest black population in the country, but then like it's only 16% of the population. You look at the list of large cities with over 1/3 of the population being black and they're all in the South. Looking at states and territories with a higher percentage of African-American residents than the national average and it's the US Virgin Islands, DC, and the entirety of the South except for Texas (which has a Hispanic plurality population), then it's New York, Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey stapled on at the very bottom.
Not to mention that the queer population is pretty consistently 3-5% in every state polled (with the exception of DC having nearly 10%, but also with the acknowledgement that the people of DC have far fewer rights than anywhere else in the mainland). By extension, this means Texas and Florida have two of the highest queer populations by raw count in the country.
Anybody engaging in this kind of rhetoric is explicitly viewing all of these people as either acceptable sacrifices or at fault for their own oppression, if they acknowledge we exist at all. It's disgusting.
