Florida Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Freedom Summer? Oh, please

Pride month

The Washington Post (behind a paywall) notes: “As part of what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is calling ‘Freedom Summer,’ his Transportation Department has told cities across the state that if they want to light up their bridges at night, they can only use the colors red, white and blue.”

Yeah, I know it’s symbolic, and all that. Still, to dub an anachronistic policy after the activism of 1964 means, to quote Inigo Montoya in the movie The Princess Bride, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Sixty years ago, people traveled through Mississippi to register Black voters who had been thwarted from voting because of punitive laws and fear of retribution. Volunteers also established Freedom Schools, libraries, and community centers for the Black community in small towns.

(One of those volunteers was David Kabat, whose sister Julie – who I know – wrote about him and the movement in Love Letter From A Pig, which she talked about before a performance of Three Mothers.)

“The[Florida] order — which was shared by Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue on social media recently — means that bridges across the state that normally illuminate in colorful arrays of light to mark holidays or awareness events won’t be able to use any other colors from May 27 through Sept. 2.”

During the 1964 summer, scores of people were arrested, some beaten. Black churches, businesses, and homes were bombed or burned, and several folks were murdered.

“‘As Floridians prepare for Freedom Summer, Florida’s bridges will follow suit, illuminating in red, white, and blue from Memorial Day through Labor Day!’ Perdue wrote on X. ‘Thanks to the leadership of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation.'”

The sound you hear is me gagging

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar notes in his Substack column: “It is clear that DeSantis especially wants to target the LGBTQ+ community by denying them the ability to display Pride colors during the Pride month of June. But his ban also affects other light displays during the summer: orange for National Gun Awareness Month; yellow for Women’s Equality Day; and red, black, and green for Juneteenth.”

I looked for articles that showed what I’ve already seen: a concerted effort to roll back gains by LGBTIQ+ folks, and a palpable fear in the community. Many are from 2023.

GLAAD: “Each of the previous two years—2022 and 2021—were record-setting years for anti-LGBTQ legislation, and the public rhetoric around these issues has increased since then.”

SPLC: “A central theme of anti-LGBTQ organizing and ideology is the opposition to LGBTQ rights or support of homophobia, heterosexism and/or cisnormativity often expressed through demonizing rhetoric and grounded in harmful pseudoscience that portrays LGBTQ people as threats to children, society and often public health.”

The Trevor Project: “75% of LGBTQ youth say that both anti-LGBTQ hate crimes and threats of violence against LGBTQ spaces often give them stress or anxiety.”

Homeland Security(!): “To protect against these increasing threats, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with support from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has launched the LGBTQI+ Community Safety Partnership.”

Vigilance

From UN Women in May 2024: “State and non-state actors in many countries are attempting to roll back hard-won progress and further entrench stigma, endangering the rights and lives of LGBTIQ+ people. These movements use hateful propaganda and disinformation to target and attempt to delegitimize people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions, and sex characteristics. ”

As in other civil rights arenas, fighting against bigotry is arguably more important now than ever. Also true: you think you’ve won the day, only to find out that you still have to fight the battle that you thought had already been litigated.

Meh. It’s exhausting. And necessary, unfortunately.

Sunday Stealing: Lucky Stubbs

Australia

The Sunday Stealing for this week is another Kwizgiver. I’ll write about Lucky Stubbs and other things.

1. Do you go in at a fast food place or just hit the drive-through?

While we’ve used the drive-through, we tend to be people who go inside. My wife doesn’t like us to eat in her car, and I get that.

However, I’ve witnessed how people in their cars are given more attention in terms of staffing at some locales than the people inside. This tends to make me irritable.

2. Have you ever lost anything down a toilet?

Undoubtedly, though, I have no specific recollection of what.

3. Do you have a dog?

In my life, I had only one dog. He was named Lucky Stubbs. I believe he was an Alaskan husky we had when I was a tween. He would nip at me, but my parents, specifically my father, seemed unconcerned. That is until he bit one or maybe both of the minister’s daughters. THEN they got rid of him, ostensibly to a farm in the area. (This is a random pic from a governmental website, BTW.)

4. Ever gone camping?

When I was a kid, we went camping a lot. I hated it. Setting up the tent, no matter how many times I had set it up, continued to be a mystery to me. I hated trying to sleep on an air mattress. There were often lots of bugs. On the other hand, I did think the Coleman stove and lamp were cool.

5. Have you met anyone famous?

I’m sure I’ve answered this before. Rod Serling, Earl Warren, Nelson Rockefeller, Anita Baker, And Randy Newman, sort of. Probably others.

6. Any plans today?

I will be singing in the church choir for the first time in three weeks and talking with my sisters for the first time in three weeks. These are related.

7. Are you happy?

Sure. I got to go to the wedding of an old friend this month. Now I can sing in the choir and talk with my sisters.

8. Where are you right now?

I am almost always in my office when I write these things.

More an irritation than a mere annoyance

9. What is the biggest annoyance in your life right now?

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said this about Florida, but it’s hardly limited to the Sunshine State. “They started by finding marginalized groups to demonize to unite people around a common enemy: Jews, gays, Catholics, or whatever group they could rally the desperate mob to hate. Then they launched overwhelming campaigns of disinformation that ensured the people didn’t know what actually was happening in the world, only what they wanted them to know.

“At the same time, they would re-engineer education so children would be prompted to embrace feverish, unquestioning patriotism while censoring what kids learned in order to promote an idealized country that never made mistakes and only had the best interests of all people in their hearts. Facts, they declared, were for nerds and elitists.”

Last

10. Last song listened to?

P.S. I Love You from On Air – Live at the BBC Volume 2 by some obscure Liverpudlian band of the 1960s.

11. Last movie you saw?

We Are Marshall (2007) is a movie based on the real story of rebuilding a football team after most of the team was killed in a plane crash. My wife and daughter were watching the film on TV, which starred Matthew McConaughey, Thursday night when I came home from choir rehearsal.

12. Are you allergic to anything?

Some trees and grasses and this season is particularly virulent.

13. Favorite pair of shoes you wear all the time?

Sneakers with support.

14. What do you think of when you think of Australia?

Aboriginal peoples; the Sydney Opera House; the Great Barrier Reef; the Australian Open, the first of the tennis Grand Slam events each year; and the fact that about two-thirds of its land mass is boringly named (Western Australia, South Australia, Northern Territory).

15. Do you use smiley faces on the computer a lot?

I rather loathe them. That would be a hard NO.

2022 Pride Parade: more important than ever

cardboard jesus

The 2022 Pride Parade occurred in Albany, NY, on June 12. When I came to church, I could see Molly, the youth coordinator, and others decorating a car. I’ve participated, off and on, at least since 2007. (COVID put the kibosh on the event in 2020, e.g.)

By 2010, I dragged along my daughter, but by 2017, and surely long before, she was participating independently.

In my 2013 post, I worried about an antigay backlash that I thought was always around the corner. I felt that there was a certain unfortunate “We made it to the mountaintop” thinking in conversations. And after the SCOTUS affirmed marriage equality in 2016, it would be reasonable to assume that the battle had been won, or at least nearly so.

The last six years have proven that to be anything but true. Antigay violence, book banning, and your basic bigotry, often in the false name of Christianity, have distressed me.

Corporate America doesn’t know what to do. State Farm was criticized after celebrating Pride and then dropping a program supporting LGBTQ books in schools. Disney’s initial response to Florida’s Don’t Say Gay distressed its employees. As the company became less cowardly, Florida governor Ron DeSantis decided, with the state legislature’s support, to punish Disney (and probably Florida taxpayers as well.)

Not according to plan

After church, my daughter and I went to find our church’s car/float, walking on the sidewalk in the opposite direction of the parade. Finally, we discovered the car stuck at its launch location. The car’s starter failed to engage. Worse, the two people waiting were stuck there because they couldn’t even close the windows.

But I was told that one of our group took our cardboard Jesus, put it on a hand cart, and walked it through the parade. (A photo appears on the Times Union website Were You Seen. It is near the end of the 2022 Albany Capital Pride Festival and Parade album.) Coincidentally, I saw photographer Jay Zhang driving behind the parade. I thought he needed help getting out of the park, but he said he needed to get a few shots of the parade; he took more than “a few.”

I briefly marched with the Albany Public Library contingent, because LIBRARY, before stopping back at my church so my wife could take me to the train station. Perhaps my daughter would come with us to see me off? Nah, she hung out with her friends at the Festival in Washington Park after the march, which, BTW, was fine with me.

Kübler-Ross and IMPOTUS defeat

Remembering RBG

Fraud — **My daughter keeps track of GOP tropes. This design is available on sweatshirts.**

You know, this political season has made me exhausted. I hoped the election would settle things, though I had my doubts.

Sure enough, Attorney General Barr is acting like IMPOTUS’ personal attorney. The future ex-President removes the scientist from overseeing a key climate assessment report. The grift continues. He seems to be engaged in a scorched earth policy. If he doesn’t concede, the GSA head won’t release the mechanism for Joe Biden to be a part of an orderly transition.

But it’s more than that. The vitriol is still strong. And, as people saw on my Facebook feed that Saturday, some guy came around to attack me personally for being pleased that Biden had won. It wasn’t some random guy either, but a fellow who had been my next-door neighbor when I was growing up in Binghamton, NY. Let’s call him Greg because that’s his name.

Greg had been around trolling me in the past. But I had found him useful. It’s important, I think, to understand how others think. This time, he was hyper-critical and fairly nasty at that. He said that I didn’t vote for the man because IMPOTUS had hurt my feelings?

Well, no, I objected to him trying to wreck the very fabric of the country: the postal service, the Census, the CDC, the Justice Department (see above), the EPA, etc, etc, etc.

Greg also seemed to be offended because I was a fool not to recognize that I’m financially better off under the regime. He never used the term directly. But I sensed that he was suggesting that since black people’s unemployment was down, pre-pandemic, I was oblivious to the regime’s “greatness.”

cf RBG’s death

Here’s the thing. I don’t agree with the premise. The tax cut helped the rich far more than regular folks. But even if I had concurred, I still thought his policies, toward COVID, immigration, the environment, and so much more, plus his constant lying, were disqualifying attributes. But why pick on me? There were plenty of people who are happy that the reign of error was over.

Then I saw Remembering RBG: A Nation Ugly Cries with Desi Lydic. It was a special program from The Daily Show folks. Desi was going through the five stages of grief as described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. Although, instead of acceptance, the fifth stage is action. Not incidentally, Elizabeth Warren, as usual, offered wise counsel.

So Greg, I recognize, was grieving. He dumped on me because he sort of knew me, though I haven’t seen him in a half-century. I get it.

In my recollection, when Hillary lost in 2016, the reaction was mostly utter shock and depression, not rage. As my teenage daughter noted, in 2016, we were saying, “That can’t be true!” even as we grudgingly knew, unfortunately, it was. The losing side in 2020 has been fed the notion “It IS NOT TRUE!” (See John Oliver.) That’s a harder bridge to cross.

BTW, I remain infuriated by the continued voter suppression, particularly in Florida. The GOP won the state by about 340,000. More than twice as many released felons were disenfranchised. Maybe the Sunshine State COULD have gone the other way…

Voter suppression, 2020 edition

The ballot goes in the envelope which goes into the mailing envelope

Voter suppression is alive and well in 2020 America. Some of it is systemic, some intentional.

You may recall that the good voters of Florida – I write that without irony – decided that they would do the right thing in 2018. They reinstated the voting rights of felons who had served their time, except for murderers and sex offenders. Constitutional Amendment 4 was passed overwhelmingly, to my surprise.

But wait! The state legislature almost immediately added a provision that if felons owed fines and court costs, they STILL couldn’t vote. To no one’s surprise, many of the felons are poor. So the extra requirement amounts to a poll tax, which is a violation of the 24th Amendment, ratified in 1964.

To make things more complicated, it is also difficult for felons to determine what they owe. The Florida Division of Elections web site says:

Seriously?

If a person is still unsure about fines, fees, costs, and restitution, and the impact upon restoration of voting rights, the person can ask for an advisory opinion from the Florida Division of Elections. Please review section 106.23(2), Florida Statutes, and Florida Administrative Code Rule 1S-2.010 for how to ask for an advisory opinion and what information is required.

Meanwhile, former New York City mayor and rich guy Michael Bloomberg, with others, is trying to clear the financial debt of the freed felons. Naturally, Florida’s attorney general Ashley Moody has an issue.She requested that the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigate Bloomberg’s efforts, as “potential violations of election laws.”

Bloomberg and his political operation “have raised more than $16 million from supporters and foundations.” The goal is “to pay the court fines and fees for more than 30,000 Black and Latino voters in Florida with felonies, allowing them to vote in the upcoming election.” Ya know, Florida, if you didn’t violate the will of your populace by instituting a poll tax, Mike and his colleagues wouldn’t NEED to pay off the felons’ tabs.

The naked ballot

Pennsylvania’s ‘naked ballots’ are 2020’s hanging chads. “Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ordered state officials… to throw out mail-in ballots submitted without a required inner ‘secrecy’ envelope in November’s election, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports… Pennsylvania requires voters to place their ballots in an unmarked ‘secrecy’ envelope before placing that inside another mailing envelope.”

With far more people likely to vote by mail in the Keystone State than ever before, this decision literally could decide the presidential election in November. Know also that a total of 16 states are required to provide secrecy sleeves for absentee/mail ballots. That includes New York. Whether those votes will be disregarded without following the correct procedure, I honestly do not know.