Florida Eagerly Turns Back the Clock to 1956

By Diane Roberts

Tired of Black people thinking their lives matter? Sick of hearing Spanish every time you’re in a Miami restaurant? Annoyed by uppity women asserting their so-called rights, gay types flaunting themselves by getting married and taking out mortgages, unwashed tree-huggers trying to stop righteous sprawl, and Marxist high school teachers making kids study pornographic Shakespeare plays?

Generally fed up with the 21st century?

Florida is here for you!

This state will take you back — way back — to a time when white men were men, white women were ladies, and dark-complected folks knew their place; a time when a man could pollute all he liked, tell hilarious jokes about breasts, Jews, and “coloreds,” and discriminate to his heart’s content.

Your Florida Legislature has already nixed all that “African-American Studies” and DEI nonsense.

I mean, what’s so bad about white culture? White people built this country — with some help from immigrant workers from Africa who, as Gov. Ron DeSantis says, “developed skills that, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Plus, in the sure and certain hope the U.S. Supreme Court will finish off what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, your Florida Legislature will cut some new districts making it damn near impossible to elect Black people.

Nothing wrong with that: Most of them fail to vote correctly.

As for the so-called “Latinos,” most of them have no business being here.

So, what if some came over in, like, 1513?

Our people (remember, we built the country!) threw them out, except for the Cubans we allowed to stay in Miami to make tasty coffee and tres leches cakes.

Out of control

Aliens are invading by the bazillions, and they’re the Worst of the Worst.

Nationwide, a solid 29% of ICE arrestees are convicted criminals. The rest haven’t quite gotten around to being criminals but you know they’re thinking about it, especially the ones claiming asylum or waiting for Green Cards.

The point is, this minority thing is out of control.

Ergo, we must go back to our glorious past.

Say, 1956.

That’s the year Florida state Sen. Charley Johns set up a committee to root out communists and homosexuals in Florida universities.

Turned out those crafty commies managed to evade detection — back then.

But, just like in the 1950s (blessed era!), Florida is once again determined to clamp down on higher ed’s fellow travelers, those tenured pinko professors in colleges our governor calls “indoctrination camps.”

In addition, the governor and Legislature have made sure youthful fascination with collectivism will be nipped in the bud.

By the time first-graders start sharing their toys and proclaiming in their little voices that capitalism is oppression, they’ll be hurled into Florida’s K-12 “History of Communism” class where they’ll learn about the wickedness of Jane Fonda (among others) and get straightened out.

The Johns Committee had more luck identifying suspected Friends of Dorothy, male students who wore Bermuda shorts, or professors seen eating lunch with other men.

Between 1958 and 1962, scores were driven out of the University of Florida alone.

Our wise leaders are continuing that fine work, forbidding the flying of rainbow flags, fighting drag queen Christmas shows, banning books about two boy penguins raising a chick, and making dang sure pronouns = genitalia.

None of that “gender theory” nonsense.

If some teenage missy gets herself in the family way, she needs to suck it up, marry the boy, and birth that baby.

Women were so much happier when they didn’t bother their little heads about college and careers, and settled down early to housekeeping and diaper-changing.

Ask your granny: She’ll tell you how fun it was.

While you’re at it, ask her about that Golden Age when you could make an honest buck in phosphate, cellulose, cane, and cows without some greenie weenie getting his knickers in a twist about pollution.

You used to be able smell Jacksonville long before you saw it: gleaming paper mills and chemical plants pumped out the profits.

Yes, people would feel a bit queasy if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, but a little toxicity never hurt anybody.

Not too much, anyway.

If everything got covered in yellow goo and, if during the 1970s, Duval County had the nation’s highest rate of lung cancer deaths, surely a little discomfort was worth it.

As Jax folks used to say, “Smells like money!”

In the 1960s, phosphate operations blossomed across Central Florida, making several dozen people extremely rich, making golf course grass great again, and beautifying the landscape with 40-story gyp stacks.

But, starting in the 1980s, do-gooders and enviro-freaks started carrying on about “pollution” and forced the Democrats who ran the state back then to start cleaning the place up.

Then, just because the seas started to rise, the state got hotter, the storms got stronger, and the floods more frequent, a bunch of hysterics started hollering about a planetary climate crisis and people started demanding the government do something about greenhouse gases and microplastics and all the things we love about post-industrial capitalism.

It’s a new dawn around here.

 Daddy issues

And Florida is so over that climate change hoax.

Your Legislature is trying to outlaw woke towns’ and cities’ attempts to institute lower emissions and sustainable energy policies.

None of that One World Government net-zero garbage getting in the way of our fine energy extraction businesses’ need for profit.

Yeah, the locals hate it, just like they hate Rep. Jason Shoaf’s proposal to dredge a huge channel through the St. Joseph Bay.

He wants to bring big, beautiful cargo ships to the northern Gulf.

What’s the problem? For 60 years, the Joe Paper Mill dumped dioxins in the bay.

(See “smells like money” above.)

The poo-pooers and their “scientist” friends will tell you churning up the dioxins now buried under tons of silt might not be a great idea for the local environment.

Rep. Shoaf says, “The sea grasses and the health of the bay was much better back then when the port was active.”

He assures us there will be no environmental damage, carcinogens or no carcinogens.

Anyway, who are you going to believe, environmental scientists and citizens who actually live there or the guy who valiantly warned us about the danger of bears on cocaine?

The rest of you should understand that if we’re going to make it back to the halcyon days of 1956, we must trust our government.

Our government knows best.

Keep repeating: Florida’s government knows best.

Daddy knows best.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.