Early Voting Week in Florida Week One
The polls are open in Florida for early voting. In Florida, the primaries are closed--but that may not mean what you think it means! Seats that are officially non-partisan like most school board seats, judicial elections, etc, anyone registered to vote in Florida can vote for any candidate on the ballot in their precinct.
This is really important because if someone in an open primary (read no parties) gets 50% of the vote or more they win the seat outright–they will not be on the ballot in November. For most school board seats and judges that means the primary is the only race they'll be in this year–you won't have a chance to vote for or against them in November.
However for party affiliated seats (like US Senate, US House, Florida House, etc) you can only vote for people in your party.
Is this fair? Not really. Is it corrupt? Largely. Is it anti-democracy given hardly anyone votes in primaries? Yes, that's the point.
So, good news, y'all, we're going to talk elections this week!
And for the love of all that's good, please vote if you are eligible. The link below will help you with everything you need to vote.
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington DC in February of 1968.
Table of Contents
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Finite
Disappointment
The End of Haitian TPS is Hammering South Florida
While news of a devastating earth quake in Colombia is garnering front page news stories, and rightly so, the aftermath of a massive earthquake in Haiti in 2010 is still being felt to this day, especially in South Florida.
After the earthquake, Haiti's economy, which was already in tatters due to, in no small part, US anti-Haitian policies that engendered corruption there, turned a blind eye to corruption and otherwise harmed the average Haitian, started to collapse. Factor in a successful assassination of Haiti's president by people and money with ties to South Florida and you have what Haiti is today: a country the US State Department tells you you should avoid travel to at all costs.
The warning was re-issued as recently as July 10, a month ago. This has led to Haitian's being granted Temporary Protected Status, meaning, they can't be deported to Haiti. Trump and the US Supreme Court effectively ended that last month and now South Florida is facing the beginning of the consequences as even Haitian Americans with American citizenship are afraid to go to work. The public schools superintendent is begging Haitians to send their children to school, children who are often times citizens themselves.
According Miami Herald reporting, over 50,000 Haitians have lost their jobs in South Florida in the last week. Jobs that were disproportionately in health care, especially home health care, and the tourist industry.
When the United States economy sheds 50,000 jobs over a month it is front page news. Just two counties in the state of Florida lost 50,000 jobs this week. The fall out has just begun.
And none of that gets to the core of it: what about the human beings whose lives are being upended for what amounts to little more than a political stunt?
The Battle for the Democratic Party's Soul
One thing that's really driving me nuts right now about this primary season is how everything is seen through the lens of the establishment Democratic Party versus the insurgent Far Left, Democratic Socialists of America movement.
If you wanted to summarize my political views I'd say I am against political violence, whether its actual violence or implied or threatened violence, I'm pro-human rights, I'm pro-environment and I've found valid ideas and points in every ideology other than the one espoused by the interwar fascist movements and their descendents.
The statistical analysis of quality polls show we're in an anti-establishment moment, not a pro-socialist, pro-mainstream Democrat, pro-centrist, pro-MAGA moment. People are angry and they're lashing out at whomever has power. Statistician and analyst G. Elliot Morris does a great job of tackling this analysis.
What this moment isn't about is what party x is doing internally. The average voter doesn't care about the over arching direction of the Democrats or the Republicans.
I write this as someone who does care about the over arching direction of the parties.
Now, apparently this reference to analysis by me and the analysis itself is often written off by people who say they are on the left as "condescending" and insulting and if I really cared about every day working class people I'd only think about and center their...grievances.
Here's the reality, and if you want to write it off as condescending, feel free: more than ever in this moment people don't feel seen, heard or represented. They're tired of corrupt politicians, corrupt oligarchs and tech barons, and politicians that show more fealty to the corrupt power holders than the every day people.
G. Elliott Morris
Voters are looking for people to stand up for them. Sometimes, this can look like standing up for x group's rights while downplaying, ignoring or even attack y group's rights, even their rights to exist. It never has to and it never should.
We need to attack the narrative that politics is a zero sum game. The rights of steel workers don't have to come at the expense of trans people's right to exist. More human rights for any group should mean all human rights for all groups.
Florida
Gonna Florida, Crazy
Recently, when it became clear that former Republican turned right of center Democrat David Jolly was going to easily walk away with the nomination to be the Democratic candidate for Florida governor in November, his presumptive opponent, Trump endorsed Byron Daniels, started running attack ads against Jolly painting him as "crazy," given his support for LGBTQ+ rights.
"The only way you defeat crazy is you stand up to it," Daniels says in the ad.
Setting aside, just for the moment, the unnecessary ableist connotations to "crazy," funny thing is, American democracy is built on "crazy" in support of crazy freedoms.
A quote from around the signing of the American Declaration that's attributed to Benjamin Franklin is "we must all hang together, or... we shall all hang separately," captures the craziness of rebelling against the world's super power in 1776. In fact, two out of three American colonists thought the Revolution was a bad idea in 1776! Byron Daniels would have said it was crazy.
A few years later General George Washington was crazy to cross the Delaware on Christmas morning–that's why it worked brilliantly.
Alexander Hamilton thought George Washington was crazy for not essentially naming himself king and running for a third term, yet it set a precedent later encoded into the Constitution itself.
Peak revolutionary zealot Thomas Jefferson (who was thrilled by the bloody French Revolution until it became clear that the blood of innocents had run way too deep) thought it was both crazy and beautiful that he won the presidency without a shot fired, calling it a bloodless revolution.
Many Americans, both North and South thought Lincoln was crazy for allowing Black men to enlist to fight for their own freedom during the Civil War. Without those soldiers the South likely would have won the war.
People would have thought it crazy to the point of impossible for a woman to dress like a man and fight in the Civil War and yet at least 250 did just that, most famously Albert Cashier.
DeAnne Blanton
People thought FDR was crazy for naming a woman to Secretary of Labor and yet Frances Perkins became one of the most consequential Cabinet Members in American history helping bring in things we all take for granted like Social Security, our right to unionize, the 40 hour work week and child labor laws.
Dwight D. Eisenhower knew the invasion of Normandy to stop the scourge of fascism was crazy–he just hoped it was crazy enough to work–so he wrote a letter to the President admitting defeat and taking the blame for it. A letter he never sent in no small part because the Germans started surrendering assuming they Allied forces weren't crazy enough to attack the beaches with just one wave per landing site. The Allies had only one wave per landing site.
While Martin Luther King Jr. was still in school one of the first acts of civil disobedience leading to the various Civil Rights Acts of the 1950s and 1960s happened on a beach in South Florida when a group of "crazy" people integrated a beach in 1945. One of the Black lawyers on call to help would become the first Black Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States, Thurgood Marshall.
Gregory W. Bush
Rosa Parks was crazy for not giving up her seat on that bus–jail was the least of her concerns when she decided to do that.
The bus boycotters in Montgomery walked to work for a year during that bus boycott something the dominant white class thought too crazy to happen...until it did.
When Martin Luther King Jr.'s house was firebombed for having the audacity for being the face of the boycott, a crowd of at least 300 gathered outside ready to become a violent mob. King calmed them with this "crazy" speech:
“Don’t do anything panicky,” King told the crowd from the front of the porch. “Don’t get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies.”
As Freedom Riders were watching their busses burn and some were murdered pretty much everyone thought they were crazy for continuing to travel to the Deep South to fight for Civil Rights for Black people.
The idea of going to the Moon was crazy until Neil Armstrong did just that, on the math of Black woman and savant Katherine Johnson, the computer prowess of Black woman and computer genius Dorothy Vaughn, two woman of color NASA was "crazy" enough to put in charge of their respective fields (after those women took charge despite Jim Crow telling them no).
Kirsten Dunst
Miccosukee Tribal Chairman Buffalo Tiger was "crazy" for standing with "crazy" Marjory Stoneman Douglas in stopping the inevitable world's largest airport along US 41 in the Everglades. Their "crazy" stand led to the creation of the National Preserve system and the modern environmental review process. That's a story that has been on the National Park Service (in part, it doesn't say much about the crucial role the Miccosukee played) website for years–until Trump ordered it taken down. Thankfully, you can still read it here!
Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera may or may not be there person who threw the first brick during the Stonewall Rebellion in New York, but they both participated in what was a crazy uprising against the anti-LGBTQI+ police state in New York City at the time.
250 to 250
From the fight for our country's right to exist at all to the fight for basic rights for every American, razy is essential to democracy. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
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If you read this you know I'm making a documentary about the prayer vigils outside of the so-called Alligator Alcatraz. Someone beat me to the punch (I think it is a complimentary approach so I'm actually excited for it) and it is viewing next month at, well, my church. It's FREE. Check this out.
Historic
Interlude
August 8, 1945 Virginia Key (Miami), Florida
After a "crazy" attempt to integrate a beach further north, rather than make a mess the white people of what was then Dade County (now Miami-Dade) decided to let Black people have a beach on a sparsely inhabited reachable only by boat island just off the coast of Miami itself.
Amelia Orjuela Da Silva | Miami Times
This was one of the first examples in US history of coordinated civil disobedience and was part of the early stages of the Civil Rights movement. One lawyer on the scene, Lawson Thomas went on to be the first Black judge in the South. A lawyer they had on call, Thurgood Marshall, went on to be the first Black Supreme Court Justice.
Infinite
Hope
This past Sunday my pastor gave a sermon on finding common ground with people we disagree with, especially within the Christian Church. Now, I don't want this to be a religious newsletter and I've already invited you to an event at my church (though, to be quite clear Betty Osceola the keynote speaker is not Christian) but I think this is worth sharing. It did give me hope.
Bear
The History Hound Finds
Mark Keierleber
Amy Qin and Flávio Pessoa
Isabela Dias
Paul Krugman
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