“Florida, where woke goes to die.”
Actually, Gov. DeSantis, your particular Florida is where America goes to die.
For all the different ideas about what makes America special, the freedom to think, speak, read and learn has always been what matters the most. And if there’s one thing true about that, it’s that we grow and learn as a society by studying the things we did wrong in history.
The problem is that the right wing has decided to pretend that things like slavery and anti-semitism never happened. There was never a genocide against Native Americans or prejudice against immigrants.
In fact, if you listen to them, America has pretty much always been damn near perfect.
And boy, do they get angry when anyone dares suggest it’s not.
In Florida recently, the DeSantis crew showed just how disgraceful they could be when they used a complaint by one parent to ban the lovely poem Amanda Gorman read at President Biden’s 2021 inauguration from being read by students at a Florida elementary school.
One parent.
Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” is about building a better America, about outgrowing past prejudices and learning to appreciate each other for what we ll have in common.
The complaining parent said the poem was full of hatred toward America.
DeSantis was quick to say the book hadn’t been banned, that it was only removed from an elementary school library and moved to the middle school library.
Because of course, kids in fifth grade are too young to be traumatized by the knowledge that America isn’t perfect.
Although if you understand what America is really about, where it has been and where it is headed, you’re probably too smart to vote Republican.