~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Florida is far away from Iowa, so what’s it matter what the Florida governor is doing to education and civil rights? We have our own problems with our guv.
However, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is diving whole-hog into autocratic behavior in order to get votes two years from now. I think he’s making a mistake about how he can be the President of the U.S., but what am I thinking? We already had one of him, what’s to prevent another?
Like his apparent mentor, he is the kind of pol who gets even. DeSantis chastised Disney World because of their publicly mocking him for his ban on discussing same-gender relationships in schools – the media took up the slogan “Don’t Say Gay”—and then DeSantis took away a few of Disney’s privileges as the biggest employer in the state. When the Disney company encouraged other Florida companies to speak against such censorship and to quit giving money to DeSantis, DeSantis really had to get even.
He recently rounded up Disney cartoon characters who wander around Disney World talking to kids. He sent them to Manhattan. Are they too gay for DeSantis? Last year he rounded up undocumented immigrants and flew them to a New York island’s tourist spot. And now, he’s dictating what history the schools can teach, leaving out our ignominious behaviors like genociding Native Americans, importing Africans to slave in cotton fields. Why doesn’t he want us to know the real history? Why sugarcoat it? Why bury it?
Oh! It has to do with white people looking bad.
Is he white? I’m white, and I’m used to being identified as bad because of my whiteness. Once I learned a few things in college, I read history to learn the truth about U.S. immoral behavior. I then learned the way to carry on as a noble democracy; there was no place to hide except by not telling future generations anything about anything except winning battles. Great Britain, our first teacher, is basically white and has a horrible history of colonization across the entire globe. (The sun never set on the British Empire.) Germany, for 20 years after WWII, refused to talk about their role in genocide of the Jewish race. The U.S. was in bad company and did not feel bad about it. They lied to Native Americans, breaking treaties, killing them, giving them blankets filled with the pox, dragging them to desert reservations and abandoning them to more lies.
There is no goodness in any of this, but sweeping our bad behavior under the rug does not make it disappear. I was an adult before I learned there were entire books on our past with information never passed on to me. Had we learned the truth in our public education, perhaps we’d have done fewer horrible things for two centuries. For one thing, the slogan Black Lives Matter might have appeared as a movement in 1860 rather than in 2013.
Will revealing truth in history textbooks help? It might shame us into decency. Common sense and even a cursory glance at history shows that doing nothing about our past but hiding it has done no good. I recall no grade school or high school history teachings on genocide and slavery by my country; college was my eye-opener. And gradually, because of the Civil Rights years and the rebellion against Jim Crow, we were being educated about our real past. And the white nationalists took fright again.
The bill that Florida’s DeSantis passed (he convened his legislature to vote for this bill; how much did that cost Florida taxpayers?) fulfilled his request to punish the Disney company for its stances on social and education issues that opposed his own ideas of what social justice and education meant – a far cry from the definitions of these words. They have fallen prey to lies, distortions and fake “facts.” DeSantis, like Trump, is a devotee to these.
The press conference for signing the bill to demote Disney was a free celebration where DeSantis could advertise his power to the world via the press as he finagled a 50-some-year-old agreement with the state to deny Disney the ability to self-govern.
One upshot of this is that the counties in the Disney area will now be paying for Disney’s fire, water and other basic utilities. These small governments are not happy. But DeSantis has proven his bravado, taken away something from what he calls the “woke” Burbank [CA] backers and owners of Disney.
He is afraid of being “woke.”
Which is apparent. Woke is now defined in the Merriam Webster Dictionary (since 2017) as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice) and identified as U.S. slang. It originated in African American English and gained widespread use beginning in 2014 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. By the end of that same decade, it was also being applied by some as a general pejorative for anyone who is or appears to be politically left-leaning”
A-ha! “Left-leaning”!
DeSantis, of the fascist-leaning, is afraid of the Left. Disney is too “woke” for him and the children of the state of Florida who might have already learned from their parents about facts and how to treat others [social justice].
The name DeSantis according to Surname Database was “originally a nickname for a pious person or perhaps, given the robust humour of the period – the complete reverse!”
So, the reason I write about the Florida governor is that he will probably be running for President in 2024. From his behavior, it is easy to see that he’s thumbed through Donald Trump’s playbook and underlined a few ways to do things. The two boys (who both fit the definition of…once a man, twice a boy) – Ronald and Donald – may be increasingly at each other’s throats. What headline-making hi-jinks for the media rather than what Ronnie and Donnie will be doing under cover of their outrageous behavior.
I know that our governor is of the same mold; but she is a woman, after all, and will never get the same coverage no matter what she does. But will she copy DeSantis like she copied Trump? For us to have two male Trumpeteers out there headlining our morning newspaper every day, well, it forfends a future too much like the recent past. I’m re-upping with The Manchester Guardian newspaper. It gives me the news but it is stingy with repetitious headlines; it trumpets far less than U.S. newspapers.
