Let’s Move to the South, It’s Cheaper
A Perilous Sojourn in Coastal Florida After Decades in ‘Progressive’ D.C.
When the Washington, D.C. nonprofit devoted to keeping an old, ineffective health law alive fired me for being outspoken on universal health care and diversity in the office I took the depression route, nourished my anger, while my younger partner, stressed out, got the idea to move to Pensacola, Florida.
Why because the beaches’ sands are spectacularly white, the seas emerald, and the cost of living is dirt cheap.
The first two claims are wobbly, and the dirt-cheap cost of living is lame, don’t ever fall for that as an excuse to move to the filthy south, especially Florida where a governor hates LGBTQ people, uses the police force to kill Black people, and purposefully lets covid19 spread in the schools and populace. Gov. Ron DeSantis as I note here, here, and here is not only a rabid racist but an authoritarian set on being the next Donald Trump.
Yes the tiny town’s beaches were somewhat appealing compared to the dirty ones on the eastern shore, like Rehoboth, but nevertheless Pensacola is a glowing sun all the time, parrot weather, and home to a large population of Christian rightwing zealots and raving white supremacists. There are Oath Keeper and Proud Boy training grounds in Pensacola. It is no place for queers.
After my partner, an immigrant from Laos with family and friends in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, realized Pensacola was a dangerous retirement town of musty white people with no opportunities for him or me, he regained focus and took control. He got me focused on writing and my mental and physical health, secured me health care through a VA program, and landed himself a steady job in Milwaukee, before moving me and the cats there in October 2022.
Both of us lived in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades, we left much behind in terms of financial gain and ego.
But there are no friends to be had in D.C. It is a nest of rats.
As I note in this piece the National Health Law Program, led by Karens and focused on reviving Medicaid — a very old health care insurance program available to a sliver of the dirt poor in the U.S. Since Medicaid is run by both the states and federal government it’s also patchwork. Medicaid in Alabama is laughable, while Medicaid in New York might only garner a snicker. But it is an old, flawed program that uses cost-benefit analysis in deciding which poor people should get a decent to pathetic health care insurance package.
I also had the enormous fortune of working for one of D.C.’s most fringe single-issue groups called Americans United for Separation of Church and State, now headed by a monotheist lightweight Rachel Laser, and includes a large Development team to support its burgeoning litigation outfit led by snotty privileged white guys.
I worked five years for the org, which was smaller but just as filthy and clownish. The men I worked for are zealots, humorless, and misogynists.
As I note in this piece the longtime communications director Joe Conn relished dehumanizing women at the organization and young gay men.
Conn was also, to the great detriment of the organization, a devoted student of the Confederacy. (So much so, he kept a big book on his desk celebrating the Confederacy’s various flags and young men who fought to keep slavery alive. Conn was a real right-winger with a partner who is a smug fuck with about as much appeal as roadkill.)
Both those orgs will continue to fleece donors, mainly white people on the east coast and large foundations in the case of the “National Health Law Program.”
But grassroots efforts in cities and states are where the real action lives. As D.C.’s labor groups have shown, most “progressive” outfits in the city are out-of-touch and devoted to their own survival and self-assumed relevance.
In the case of Milwaukee, where I now reside in a flat with my partner and two cats, there are groups devoted to reviving a socialist movement that once early in the 20th century had an impressive socialist stronghold.
And there is much work to do.
As I note here, Wisconsin, like Ohio and Florida, has been drifting right-wing for a longtime now. Former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., now head of the useless American Constitution Society, lost his Senate seat to an aging white state Republican Ron Johnson, who just won another six-year term. Feingold tried to win his seat back by flaunting campaign finance laws and raising boatloads of money, but still failed.
Johnson’s most recent challenger Mandela Barnes, former Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor, was let down by the DNC and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., as big money from the RNC filled the airwaves with racist attacks against Barnes, who lost a close election to Johnson, now an avowed supporter of former president Donald Trump, the raving white supremacist former president.
There is ample opportunity for action to save Wisconsin from becoming Ohio or god-forbid a Florida. The Republican state legislature now has a couple of socialist representatives within its midst who have created a socialist caucus. Groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, DSA Milwaukee, and Socialist Alternative are a few of the expanding grassroots efforts to bring progress and justice to a city and state battered by right-wing white people on dairy farms. (Those farms also likely house Oath Keeper and Proud Boy gatherings and trainings.)
D.C. is not where the fun or action is. That city is a part of the problem and its “progressive” nonprofit advocate groups are aging, filled with nepobabies and Karens, long out-of-touch, and languishing.
