My wife and I have been traveling since last Thursday. We are in Florida, but my eye has been on the weather and the presidential primary in New Hampshire. We left in a snowstorm that I am told evolved into a traffic paralyzing ice storm, followed by more snow, and capped by subzero temps on Saturday night. My weather app now tells me that it might be snowing on Primary Day.
As I write, I am a world away in Key West. As a measure of my loyalty to the four seasons, I am very sorry that I am missing all of that real winter weather in New Hampshire. The weather and the sunsets, as you can see in the header, are great in Key West, but it just doesn’t feel like February.
My first trip to Florida was in May of 1952. My father took me with him while he attended a convention that was held in the old convention center in Coconut Grove. We drove there from our home in Shawnee, Oklahoma, stopping in East Texas to pick up a friend from his seminary days. I was excited about the trip across the South and everything about our hotel in Miami, but I remember getting bored with the meetings. What would a first grader do to entertain himself at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention?
My father gave me five dollars, a huge sum, the most money I had ever had, and let me loose to wander alone through the exhibits. I don’t think that he thought that I might slip out of the building. Once I had escaped from the building, I went exploring. Coming from Oklahoma, I had never seen the ocean, nor had I seen many boats before. I discovered that sailboats and yachts were docked next to the convention center. I walked up and down rows and rows of boats that seemed to be just waiting for someone to use them. The whole scene around the convention center amazed me as I ventured out toward palm lined Bayshore Drive. I don’t remember any problems from my excursion, and I got back to my father before he became suspicious. These days my father would probably be arrested for giving a first grader that much freedom.
I had never seen anything like the boats, Biscayne Bay, or the royal palms that lined the streets of Coconut Grove. Before we left to go home we crossed what I assume now to be the Venetian Causeway so that I could swim in the breakers and surf of the “real” ocean at Miami Beach. It’s ironic that for the last twenty years my oldest son and his family have lived just off Bayshore Drive about halfway between the old convention center, the site of my adventure and Vizcaya. There was one disappointment in the trip. I was politicking for a short flight to Cuba that did not happen.
Over the years I have made many trips to Florida, but until last Sunday I had never been to Key West. Key West is a side adventure on this trip. We came to Florida to attend grandparents’ day at my granddaughter’s high school, and then travel up to Tampa to watch her play in a big weekend volleyball tournament. To make a nice round trip, we flew into Tampa, visited friends in Clearwater, drove with them to Fort Myers, and took the “fast boat,” The Key West Express, from Fort Myers to Key West.
When we leave Key West we will drive up the Keys to Key Largo for a night before arriving in Coconut Grove for the day at my granddaughter’s school. That’s not the end of the tour. We close the loop back to Tampa via Palm Beach where we hope to meet my wife’s 96 year old Ukranian aunt that we discovered after adventures on 23andMe and Ancestry. My wife is one of a growing number of people who have learned that they are not who they always thought they were. She thought she was Irish, but 23andMe has told her that she is fifty percent Ukrainian. We will probably never learn the story of how that happened since all the players but the aunt are dead. After visiting the youngest sister of the man who was her biological father, it’s on to Tampa and my granddaughter’s volleyball tournament before coming home next week. Grandparents brag. My granddaughter is a lovely young woman who is a diligent student and a good athlete who hopes to continue to enjoy her sport in college.
As excited as most people are about going to Florida, I doubt that I would have much interest in going there if it weren’t for my family. I feel that way about most of the South, and that saddens me. I am an expatriate.
These days Florida is a different world for me where the pleasure of the natural beauty and excellent weather in the winter are canceled out by much of what I see and experience. As the president would say, I know that there many, many good people in Florida, and it maybe true that it is much more like the rest of America than my little town on the quiet side of New Hampshire, but any pleasure I might get from the experience will be diminished by other things which I will try to explain.
When I travel I realize that I live in a very atypical environment where it is easy for me to find others who share my views of what is important. In Florida, I am not so certain. Over the last few months as we have suffered through the tensions of the impeachment process, I have been annoyed by the continual references made by the debating politicians to “the will of the American people.” Some of the most annoying politicians seem to have been elected by the people I see here on the golf courses and yachts that are so prevalent. Perhaps I am being unfair since politicians from both sides often speak as if Americans are some homogeneous clan. What I hear makes me think that politicians see us as one homogenous mass of humanity with one collective identity, one set of values, one set of concerns and problems, and one collective objective. It is also true that most of them think they have something special to offer, and we should fall in line behind them.
Earlier this year the president announced, “I am the chosen one!” To emphasize his point he turned his body slightly to the left and looked heavenward over his left shoulder as he said the words. He topped that sense of self importance when he showed up at the National Prayer Breakfast a few days ago to gloat about his “acquittal.” Here is how Cal Thomas of the Washington Post described what followed after the president refused to shake hands with or acknowledge Nancy Pelosi:
The co-chairs of the 2020 breakfast, Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-N.Y.), spoke of their deep personal relationship and their ability to bridge differences because of it.
Arthur Brooks, former head of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based conservative think tank that researches government, politics, economics and social welfare, and who is also a Harvard University professor and columnist for The Washington Post, spoke of reconciliation and loving one’s enemies.
When it was Trump’s turn to speak, he said: “Arthur, I don’t know if I agree with you,” and then went on a tear proving that he didn’t. He criticized those who claim to pray for him and misuse their faith for political ends, according to him. He implied that “those in this room” (more than 3,000 attended) all support him and those who don’t are not genuine Christians.
The president’s pronouncements at the National Prayer Breakfast are of no potential continuing consequence to this country, but the budget proposals that his administration released yesterday are. As Jim Tankersley, Margot Sanger-Katz, Alan Rappeport and Emily Cochrane describe in their New York Times article, the president will be running on a platform that advocates for severe reductions in the social services safety net.
President Trump released a $4.8 trillion budget proposal on Monday that includes a familiar list of deep cuts to student loan assistance, affordable housing efforts, food stamps and Medicaid, reflecting Mr. Trump’s election-year effort to continue shrinking the federal safety net.
At a time when we are concerned about the “diseases of despair” and deterioration of the social determinants of health, this chosen one who wants to make America great again is proposing that we pull the rug out from under so many of the most vulnerable among us. What irks me about Florida is that much of our wealth is out in the open. I see so much evidence of our national wealth here that I do not understand why we must reduce our support for the less fortunate who are among us, or harass the undocumented who get by on the meager compensation associated with cleaning our houses, waiting on our tables, and collecting our garbage. The savvy political pundits suggest that the president is likely to get reelected because the economy is so good. The economy is good for a lot of people, including my family, but where I live, and in many places where I look in Florida, there are many people who are paying a high price for the poor judgement of choosing to be poor, or choosing parents who were poor.
As I travel in a place like Florida, I realize how diverse we are in every way except for a few common concerns. We all seem to be afraid of something. We all are concerned about encroachments on our personal freedom. We all are concerned about our children. Sometimes we extend that concern to all children, now and in the future, and most of us are concerned about the future of our planet although many will not admit it for fear of what the admission might cost them. We all are concerned about our health, and the health of the ones we love. If we are doing well economically, the only variation between us in all of these similarities is how large a circle we each draw to include some of the people who might be a little different than we are. As John Edwards said, there are two Americas. One of the Americas is wealthy, and doing everything it can to protect what it has. There is another America which doesn’t give much thought to how big the circle of concern is because they know that are on the outside. They live in the second America where you pay all sorts of penalties for being poor, including challenges to your health. You have no 401K. You have no tax benefits coming your way beyond a little refund from the earned income tax refund if you made a little money at a low paying job. If you are in Key West, it is not to stay overnight for several hundred dollars, it is to live in the shadows of wealth where you wait tables, wash dishes, or clean rooms, and make beds while you worry about what will happen to your children. I fear this president will be reelected to defend the economy that requires an underclass.
Florida offers some amazing contradictions and contrasts. As of 2017, 54.7% of Miami residents were born outside of the United States, but within Miami and the state there are some of those new arrivals who are among the most vociferous advocates for limitations on immigration. Along the coasts and inland waterways the homes and businesses are some of the most lavish in the country. The nearer you get to the water as you drive the more likely it is that a car that pulls up next to you at a stoplight is a Maserati or or Lamborghini. Further away from the water, the scenery changes from palm trees and convertibles to old pickups and strip malls built on pumped and paved over wetlands surrounded by marginal housing that could pass as a movie set for a third world country. There are wonderful hospitals and medical schools in Florida, but it is also one of the states that has refused the Medicaid extension offered by the ACA.
Florida is a crucial state in the presidential election. The winner of the Florida electoral votes has won the presidency in every election since 1972 except for 1992 when the state went for Bush 1, and Clinton won with the aid of a third party candidate. The 2000 election was the closest. We all remember the “hanging chads” and Bush II’s “win” 5-4 in the Supreme Court which awarded Florida’s votes and the presidency to Bush.
Florida is much more religious than New Hampshire. New Hampshire ranked last in the nation in church attendance according to the Pew Research Center in 2014. There are mega churches in Florida with thousands of members and though its overall church attendance doesn’t beat Utah at 53% or Alabama at 51%, it does well at 35%. I sometimes think that there is an inverse relationship between church attendance and a willingness to extend the principles of the ACA to everyone in the population.
I have recently found a new religious guru, Barbara Brown Taylor. She is an Episcopalian priest whom Time magazine once dubbed as one of the 100 most influential Americans. Her sermons, books, and the essays she writes in the Christian Century have gained a wide audience among people of many faiths, or no faith at all. Many people have repeated her quote:
“Jesus was not killed by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix.”
That quote seemed appropriate to my feelings this week in the aftermath of a failed impeachment effort, the State of the Union address, and the president’s National Prayer Breakfast performance. My sense is that Barbara Brown Taylor is describing the reality that the practitioners of most religions tend to be very dualistic, you are either in or out of their group. This exclusivity or required conformity is contrary to the foundational concepts of their central figures who taught a message of inclusiveness and harmony with others that is characterized by generosity toward everyone. Donald Trump was demonstrating his own personal variations on the dualism theme at the Prayer Breakfast and with his budget proposals. I believe that dualism is also counter to the philosophy espoused in our Declaration of Independence which we have had so much difficulty honoring:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
When we combine misguided religion with a disregard for founding principles espoused by a “chosen one,” we are moving toward possibilities for disappointment that far exceed the loss of the gains we enjoyed from the partially actualized intent of the ACA. We should not sell out the quest to live up to the challenges of our founding documents for a few points on the Dow or the S and P 500. I don’t know why it is that when I drive around Florida, I feel we are so vulnerable to the widening healthcare, economic, and philosophical divides that have become so much more obvious over the last three years, and the last three months, but my feelings are real. I want my grandchildren to grow up in the America I have always wished we were. I want that for everyone’s grandchildren.
