What We've Learned about 'Florida Man'

Changing our minds about the Sunshine State. Mainly thanks to an innovative local newspaper.

A daily newspaper doing its best to inform local residents about challenges in the community, and engage them in solutions: Some recent clippings from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

This is a road report, mainly from Deb, about discoveries during an unexpected relocation. The setting is the west coast of Florida, between Sarasota in the north and the small town of Englewood in the south, with Venice in between. The means of discovery is a local newspaper.

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Jim and I have always felt a little guilty about short-shrifting Florida in our years of Our Towns reporting. We tried, but the right place at the right time never quite came together. (In fairness, Jim did write about a tremendously moving event in Pensacola.)

My personal Word Cloud of Florida has been admittedly harsh: Abortion bans, LGBTQ+ intolerance, infamous politicians, Disney World aggression, book bans, dismantling academia, a new New College, eruptions at public meetings, and of course Florida Man, the meme.

Now, for family reasons, I have found myself steeping in the culture of Florida for a few months. My 102-year-old vibrant mother had a setback on New Year’s Eve. She is recovering, thank you, albeit slowly, and is still a true credit to centenarians everywhere. We decided to divide and conquer for now, so Jim has been mostly in DC.

With an opportunity to give Florida another chance, I began by subscribing to the local newspaper, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Quickly, I noticed and re-embraced two fundamental Our Towns lessons: the importance and power of local journalism and citizens’ agency to affect local issues. The two themes go hand in hand.

I’ve written about what I’ve learned here, at the Our Towns website. Cutting to the chase, I believe that the Herald-Tribune, a two-time Pulitzer prize winner, is delivering on its mission to inform the citizenry and engage them in local issues that matter to them.

They report deeply on themes of education, public arts, environment, public institutions, city planning, public health, local leadership, housing and more.

—On leadership, for example, the paper produced several features on the community leaders in a multitude of areas: From a utilities manager, to a women’s issues activist, to developers, to a port manager. They produced special features on Black leaders and climate leaders.  These were created as personal, human interest stories that could inspire readers to think: “That could be me.”

—In education, which has become a hugely controversial issue in Florida, the paper has done a remarkable job of handling a wide range of issues. I have followed its reporting on courses and curriculum, school regulations, achievement standards, bans on books and their content, school governance, teacher salaries, pronoun reference, you name it. Some of those stories are the clips shown in the opening image in this newsletter. Much of Florida is in an Olympic-level tug-of-war over schooling. The paper has provided an informed, steady view.

—In public arts, the features on controversial art installations, including hitches along the way to installation, and partitioned-off semi-censoring of the final exhibit for school students.

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Finally, a few personal observations on Florida culture. These are admittedly anecdotal, but they are just a few among many. Indeed, I’ve faced moments that scream “Florida Man”, as pickups that are ratcheted-up higher than a house and tilting backwards like the Leaning Tower, careen past me in a shower of machismo and tattoos. And there are moments of extraordinary kindnesses, like the unprompted help from a surgical nurse from the VA hospital who stopped in the rain after her no-doubt busy day to help me change the oil in my laboring rental car.

The many, many stories and features in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune have given me a fuller and fairer story of Florida than the one I gleaned from reading or hearing about it from out-of-state, national reporting. I hope you read more about it here.

And I know that Jim’s attitude to the whole Florida Man concept has been transformed by his discovery of this remarkable product, from Cigar City Brewing in Tampa. We all learn in our own ways.