What Are We Doing Here?

There's something I've been thinking about a lot and it's sort of a difficult subject. 
It's about my home state. Which of course, is Florida. I've lived in Florida since I was five except for the year and a half I lived in Denver, Colorado, which is a beautiful place but one where I felt like an alien at all times. 

I've lived on the East Coast of Florida near the Atlantic and right across the white sand road from a tannin-stained, silted river with jungle islands in it. I've seen manatee and dolphins, sharks, and sting rays in that river. In another river that intersects with the one I lived on, we used to find mammoth fossils lying on the ground in plain sight on a specific dredge island that only a very few people knew about. That was a magical place to grow up. A place where many very, very hard and difficult and traumatic experiences happened to me but none of them had anything to do with the place I was living which gave me sustenance, and let my imagination go wild, lying on the dock and watching the river pass by or sitting in the crotch of an old cedar tree. 

After we moved from there when I was about twelve, we lived in Central Florida, as far from oceans as you can be in this state, but there were lakes everywhere, and rivers too. The town I lived in, Winter Haven, was known as the "City of One Hundred Lakes" and if that's hyperbole, not by much. As Hank has noted, if you meet someone from Winter Haven and ask them which lake they grew up on, they'll have an answer and it will be the name of a lake. 

I moved to Tallahassee, which is in the panhandle of Florida, up near Georgia and Alabama, when I was nineteen. Although the geography and flora and fauna were completely unfamiliar to me, I have grown to love and appreciate what we have here so much. I talk about those things frequently. The rivers and springs and the giant oak trees, the camellias in winter, the tree fruit and magnolias. We have the Gulf instead of the Atlantic but it's beautiful in its own way, albeit tamer. We still have red dirt roads near where I live and towns that move more slowly than time itself, where you can pass by small old houses where an elderly PawPaw or MeeMaw has been placed, sitting in a chair on the front porch, doing nothing in this world but watching the cars go by, maybe waving to each one. 

Of course, as Florida has always had, there are pests and critters galore that can drive you to insanity or even eat your dog. The heat and humidity are unbelievably oppressive in the summer. We have hurricanes that flatten and frighten, tear trees out by their roots, and roil the coastal waters to heights great enough to take out the most sturdily built homes along with trailers and shacks. But something about Florida has called to so many people over the long, long history of the state, who learned to tolerate the mosquitoes and snakes and panthers because there was something in it that can catch hold of a person and not let go. 

Now I'm not going to go into all of the changes that Florida has been through even from the time I was a child in the early sixties. But so many of those changes have been wrought to make the state more comfortable and tolerable to people from other areas. Trust me- if there were no air conditioning, we would not have a tenth of the population we have now. Not even close. 
And air conditioning is just one thing. There has been draining of the swamps and filling in of the Everglades. There has been construction in places that should never have been built upon. And people and people and more people have moved here, drawn by some perfect beach/Disney fantasy of what life in Florida is. And I am not going to say that things were so much better "in my day" because a lot of things are better now. 
Air conditioning, mainly. Also, roads. 
BUT, when it comes to the land and the waters and the coasts, things WERE so much better when I was a child. That's all there is to it. 

And we ain't never going back. What people refer to as "the real Florida" is almost gone and before my children join me in the afterlife of energy and soul, I fear it will have disappeared and life will once again be intolerable here. 

Having said all of this, I look around me and I can see with 20/20 vision the political horrors going on in this state. I see Ron DeSantis who has to be one of the most hateful people on this planet. He seethes with hate and the desire for power. I fear him more even than I fear that man who also lives in Florida in a magical place called Mar-A-Lago. I fear for people of color whose history DeSantis wants to erase from our history books. I fear for immigrants trying to make a life by picking the very crops that Florida is so proud of and that we, as a nation, depend on. 
I fear for all of the queer community that DeSantis has decided to demonize rather than the things that actually have the power to destroy us- big agriculture, big development, off-shore drilling. Climate change. 

When we went to the beach last Saturday to celebrate my son Hank, there were people with us who were absolutely going to be using the state park restrooms not aligned with their presumed birth gender. And you know what? I didn't even think about that. You know why? Because I am a woman of huge privilege. I am white and cis-gendered. And straight. I am old woman with a husband and four kids. There are no laws telling me I can't use the restroom of my identified gender. It did not even occur to me that some of our group were, in a way, risking their lives and freedom by using the "wrong" restroom.

This is all so incredibly disturbing and frightening and horrifying when I allow myself to truly think about it that- well. As the mother of a trans son, I don't allow myself to think about it in personal terms. 
And yet, I have to, don't I? 

Yes. I fucking well do. 

And yet- here's the thing. When people criticize Florida in broad and dismissive ways, it hurts my heart. 
We are not Floriduh. Although I can see how easy it is to see us that way. We are a state that is suffering through a horrible crisis caused by evil people. But not all of us are evil. Not even close to all of us. We are not all ignorant, bigoted meth-using, crack-smoking, gun-toting, Confederate flag waving, fundamentalist Christians who speak in tongues and handle snakes. Some of the most intelligent and thoughtful and educated and artistic and liberal people on the planet choose to live here. And I am so very fortunate to know some of them. And I am so very fortunate to know and love and call as family a whole lot of queer folks who have enriched my life in ways that I never could have imagined.  

The thing that triggered this rant was an article written by one of those people. She is a beautiful woman (and I am not kidding- she could be a model and is often mistaken as one) who is scary smart, who grew up in Florida with parents who know more about the ecosystem here than almost anyone. In this article,  entitled Overheating: Leaving My Home State of Florida, she says everything and she says it perfectly. It's a long article and I know that it's a lot to ask people to spend the time reading something that they think may not affect them. 
But I will tell you this- if things keep going the way they are in this country, it will eventually affect all of us. We all know and love gay people. Trans people. Bi- people. Gender-fluid people. ALL the people that are the latest people to be persecuted. 

Phew. 

Not to mention the state of our planet. 

Mr. Moon left for the coast a few hours ago. I am at peace and content here at home where it is relatively temperate and the skies have cleared after all of that glorious rain. 

My sheets are clean, I am having a martini with pickled green beans in it and the church next door is rocking with bass, drums, and voice for the pleasure of their lord while the crows are cawing and the cardinals are making their chip-chip calls for whose pleasure or purpose I do not know. 

But they do. 

Happy Friday, y'all. 

Love...Ms. Moon