About a decade or so ago, when I lived and worked just outside of Tampa, Florida, a friend of mine from California visited Florida and decided to invite me to dinner for a double date with a young woman who was rooming with his parents in a different part of the state. After leaving work on a Friday afternoon, I drove a couple of hours to Naples to meet them, as they had been visiting Miami and the Keys during their trip, and we had a lovely dinner before spending several hours in the hotel room my friends had, enjoying a lovely chat until it was near midnight, when I had to make the drive home, exhausted, to get to bed early enough for Sabbath services the next morning. I had thought that the young woman and I had hit it off, until a few days later when I went to work and saw her name on a news of the weird story about a psychotic breakdown in the parking lot of a McDonald’s that led to the young woman being involuntarily admitted for psychiatric care. The young woman who I had chatted with in a friendly and fairly typically mildly flirtatious way had ended up serving to help Florida’s reputation as a place for crazy people, which no doubt was humiliating for her, and hit a little too close to home for personal comfort myself, not that my fortune with women has ever been particularly good.

As someone who was raised in Florida, despite being born and currently living elsewhere, it has long been a source of personal irritation and occasionally even acute embarrassment at the way that Florida is portrayed as a giant open campus insane asylum. Nearly every day on my Facebook news feed there is some story relating to Florida that is entirely ridiculous, and that is not even to get into the portrayal of Florida that appears on television, to the point where even people like Jerry Springer have felt themselves to be morally superior to people who spend time in the Tampa Bay area on a regular basis. As I happen to live in Oregon now, I find it mildly amusing how the local population here tries to encourage others to keep Portland weird by manscaping their hipster beards and frequenting overpriced donut shops and organic grocery stores and improving their tastes in obscure vinyl music. Florida manages to keep things weird by featuring epic battles between illegally raised reticulated pythons and powerful swamp alligators, or because some of our hoboes inexplicably develop a taste for flesh and behave like zombies, or because we have drive-through liquor stores and parents who leave their kids alone so they feel it necessary to cross multi-lane highways to get to the Wal-Mart without supervision. Florida is where the people of Wal-Mart come from in popular judgement; Oregon’s quirky people make a tastefully cultured indie rock band.

My feelings about where I have come from have long been at best deeply ambivalent. As a college sophomore, for example, I happened to reside in Los Angeles, where election night was marked by my roommate playing “We Are The Champions” based on the early call of the election on one of the news networks, leading to a mob of very angry left-wing neighbors who wanted to tear my roommate apart [1]. While I held off the mob at the door to my dorm room, my roommate ran away, believing that discretion was the better part of valor. But while my roommate was inciting trouble by bragging about a political contest, I had to deal with the much longer-lasting shame of coming from an area that had showed itself an embarrassment to the rest of the country, if not the world, in terms of its terrible balloting design that left elderly Jewish widows so confused that they ended up voting mistakenly for Reform Party candidate and paleoconservative political commentator Pat Buchanan when it was likely that had they been literate in the ballot they would have cast their votes for incumbent vice president Al Gore. Even years after the election, people would bring up the story over and over again as if I somehow shared in the blame, or in the generally assessed stupidity of the place where I came from, never mind that my own personal intellect and educational achievements have seldom been questionable for anyone. But no, I too have been tarred with a bad name simply because I have come from an area that is known for its stupidity and lunacy. As if my own personal background is not enough of a burden, I have had to deal with the burden of where I grew up as well.

How does an area like Florida get a reputation for being filled with crazy people? Does the crazy stuff that happens in Florida get more attention because it happens in Florida and people are already looking for crazy things to happen, or is Florida actually statistically more crazy than other people? Does the general transience and low-cost and relatively lassiez-faire attitude of the area draw people who are likely to behave in crazy ways, whether they be elderly people in “God’s waiting room” or immigrants leaving Cuba or Haiti on ramshackle boats or affluent Spring Break tourists enjoying Daytona Beach or the Redneck Riviera that starts near Panama City Beach, or the chicano migrant farmers or deeply Conservative rural folk or the fact that all of these people are crammed together in a fairly flat area that would be left to the alligators were it not for the miracle of the railroads and air conditioning that led people to live there in the first place? Where did Florida first acquire a reputation for craziness, and did that initial reputation, whether it was well-earned or not, lead people both to emulate what was becoming a tradition as well as to mine the news stories deliberately in search of crazy news to report elsewhere? And did the local population, at least its media, put up with this situation and with the bad reputation that results out of a grim desperation for any attention at all that it accepted all of the negative attention received by virtue of the way that others stereotyped the area, rather than protest the obvious unfairness of being considered more crazy than the rest of a crazy nation in the midst of a crazy world? There is more than enough crazy to go around, after all.

My acquaintance, for example, did not deserve to be embarrassed in a story that went worldwide for what was essentially a very bad day that would have barely caused a ripple had she been from anywhere else, or if she had been able to travel home early enough to rest in her own bed and catch up on her sleep, and perhaps her medications as well. While ballots are poorly designed in Florida, it is not as if Florida has a monopoly on bad voting, as the corruption in places like Chicago ought to make plain. Yet for some reason people tend to want to put people in a box, or entire regions of people in a box, and to focus on those things that continue to feed the negative images that they have. How does one overcome stigma, so that one’s presence does not become part of a running joke, but that one can receive the respect one deserves from one’s behavior and from one’s attainments in life? How does one go about not dreading the tagline of any article or segment of news that begins with a reference to a location in Florida? These are questions that are easy to ask, even obvious to ask, but are not always so obvious to answer. Given the famewhorish ways of our contemporary culture in general [2], it is hard for an entire area to police itself well-enough to discourage those who seek to gain attention by doing something crazy that merely brings disrepute on everyone else remotely connected with them, even geographically, even if an area were so inclined to try. And it seems as if Florida is not inclined to try, perhaps because it would mean caring about one’s neighbors and what they were up to, rather than caring only about our own affairs, which are stressful enough for most of us.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/10/17/laughing-stock/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/jesus-loves-you-more-than-you-will-know/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/reality-bites/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/not-enough-room-on-the-island/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/bad-boys-bad-boys-whatcha-gonna-do/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/a-demented-culture/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/here-comes-the-judge/