Every state has something shameful to hide. But Florida is the weirdest state. It’s one thing to go online and look at the latest “Crazy Florida” lists or “Weird Florida” tours. If you Google, “Why is Florida,” before you type in another letter, it fills in, “so crazy,” “so hot,” “so weird.” But joking aside, if you drive south from Alabama and Georgia and turn on the nightly television news, you are going to find behavior that ranges from dumb and dumber to dark and despicable.
“A Florida man shot himself in his penis and testicles while claiming to be cleaning his gun,” blared one ABC-TV affiliate. “A Florida man whose hand was bitten off by a nine-foot alligator now faces charges of feeding the animal,” blared another. And state wildlife officials also were not too thrilled with a company whose business is bringing alligators with their mouths taped shut to kids’ birthday pool parties (for a $175 fee).
But then the local news goes gothic. A Florida man was upset that his wife didn’t thaw the frozen pizza and shoved her face into a dog bowl, police said. Another man forced his wife to swallow her diamond engagement ring after she announced that she was leaving. In another bad pizza story, a man punched the delivery boy after he forget garlic knots.
And then comes cannibalism. Another man “chopped off his victim’s head, removed part of the brain and an eyeball, put them in a plastic bag, walked 12 blocks to this cemetery, Lakeview Cemetery, and then ate them,” WTHH-TV reported. Other skin-eating criminals also made national news, with details too gross to mention.
So what is it? Is there something in the state’s character that delights in proving—or telling the world again and again—that Floridian facts are stranger than fiction?
“A Florida man is dead after competing in a bug eating contest at a reptile store,” another station reported. Another cockroach-eating story starred a preacher wanting to attract new parishioners. The state sponsors python killing contests, though some Floridians keep them at home as pets—until they are herded like cattle and confiscated.
The “weird Florida” list goes on and on—and then it moves into the political world.
Florida’s bad politics startled the nation in 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped a presidential recount and gave the White House to George W. Bush. Its current governor, Rick Scott, is one of America’s worst. He was elected after touting his years as CEO of Columbia/HCA, a big hospital chain that paid a total of $1.7 billion in fines for taxpayer-bilking Medicaid fraud felonies that were mostly committed while he was in charge. He spent $75 million of his money on his 2010 race. The fox now runs the henhouse.
At times, Scott, a Tea Party Republican, seems like a buffoon. At other times, he’s bent on destroying Florida government. He’s mistakenly given out phone sex line numbers at press conferences and signed a bill that unknowingly banned computers and smart phones at Internet cafes. He was called one of the nation’s worst governors by the Chronicle of Higher Education for wanting to phase out funding for the humanities. Scott resurrected a slew of Jim Crow-era voting tactics before the 2012 election, including false claims that 180,000 aliens were on voter rolls and shutting down voter registration drives.
Beyond Scott, Florida’s justice system cannot shake its inescapable racist reputation. It’s not just that the Trayvon Martin prosecution team could not convict George Zimmerman. The same prosecutor sent a black women—a young mother—to jail for 20 years for firing a warning shot after her husband, a known domestic abuser, threatened her.
Florida is a state of extremes. It has the most bugs, the highest identity theft rate in the nation, the flattest roads and the worst elderly drivers. Two of its cities, Pensacola and Jacksonville, rank in the top 10 nationally for most toxic drinking water. More cities are among the nation’s top 10 with stickiest weather: Apalachicola and Gainesville. It has the fourth most volatile economy, with one quarter of its 19.3 million residents losing one-fourth of their income in 2008 economic crash.
Why? Why? Why?
California has the most poisonous snakes, but it does not have the Sunshine State’s snake obsessions. Nor does it have a detective’s daughter displaying an ounce of cocaine from the police locker for a grade-school science project (involving sniffer dogs).
Native Floridians tend to blame everyone but native Floridians for the state’s reputation.
As UrbanDictionary.com notes, white Floridians with pre-Civil War roots are proud to be called “crackers,” and are known for fishing and swimming in lakes and rivers; knowing what swamp cabbage is and how to cook it; eating cane syrup on biscuits and gravy on squirrel and rice; and knowing to take off one’s hat when hearing Dixie or any Lynyrd Skynyrd song.
“This just makes me want to laugh,” replied Casey Schmidt, to CBS’s Miami affiliate when they asked about Florida’s weird reputation. “You say people down here only care about themselves, well that may be true. Until we know who you are and what crazy ideas you are bringing from some other crazy state, we are just going to take care of ourselves. If you don’t like the way we’re living just leave this long-haired country boy alone.”
Using boomer Southern rock lyrics to express “screw you” sentiments—courtesy of the Charlie Daniels Band—is predictable enough. But other writers to the same blog had more insightful comments.
“I live here in Pinellas County and I believe it’s a combination of extreme poverty from low paying jobs, heat, and no access to mental-health care (unaffordable health insurance and very hard to qualify for Medicaid),” another said. “You get desperate, depressed, angry, and eventually just don’t care about anything.”
