Society

Close to where I live a major route is Interstate 75 or simply I-75. To be honest it is one of the most wonderful drives I can think of, not due to the scenery rather for the truth it reveals about. Florida has one of the most distorted views in the general conscious. If pressed everyone will say that Florida is a wondrous landscape of beaches and theme parks, a destination for young and old alike. The think is that I-75 shows you the truth, it is a landscape of thick undergrowth, gnarled trees, and dank swamps. But no one sane would want to purposely visit let alone move to such a locale. As a result the idle rich set about tricking American into belief that Florida was the Garden of Eden for the new world. To be fair it has been met with success, one just has to look towards Cinderella’s castle for proof of that. But this lie has presented a problem because it was not just one lie rather an untold amount cut from the same cloth. In the haste to build these new Edens those brilliant few holding the purse strings began to tailor them to the multitude. While one would offer an Imperial air their neighbor would counter with a Venetian atmosphere. This absurd architectural arms race has lead to perhaps a fascinating snapshot of the current American psyche. This seemingly random hodgepodge of tastes and desire has left us with a severely schizophrenic society.

To take this to another level let us compare these developments to Florida’s most famous location: the Walt Disney World Resort. Although called a theme park by many this is actual not true in the slightest due to the fact the there is no constant theme between any one park much less the entire resort. The same can be said for Disneyland. Now this isn’t a damning statement against the parks at all, it is merely a statement of fact. I bring this up since Disney World is a great symbol of Florida and also the general American psyche. This mixture of themes, whose solely commonality is that fact Disney owns them, does not seem to us since we forget to look at the whole anymore. The societal trend is one of instant gratification. Be it In regards to eating, sexual stimulation, entertainment, or even housing. Because there is another aspect that is packaged with these modern Edens: community.

To be exact forced community. Now this is quite jarring when you put it bluntly like that but that is what is being done. A byproduct of the making these niche Edens is that you get a large congregation of people with similar tastes, attitudes, and social-economic status. Follow this up with the standard add-ons of home owners association with dues, member only facilities, and a gate, you are basically forced into interaction with everyone else. Again not a slight, this also happens in classrooms, prisons, and Congress. But also due to this it restricts the view of the people to just their immediate area which disconnects them from what is happening right next to them. Which may not seem like much but the same is happening there and next to them as well. This just continues right down the line. Now you may just be saying well Florida has always been fucked why else build on hurricane ravaged swampland, which I will give, but the issue here is that Florida did not build itself the rest of America did. Just look at the rest of America and the various neighborhoods found in the cities, there is not continuity either. People have clustered themselves there too. This same thing happens even in our great halls of government with the political parties and coalitions. The old trite notion of America as a melting pot is a bit lofty. Rather we are more like a buffet and any mixing that happens is due to someone tipping their plate.

Now it is due to this isolationist attitude that we find ourselves in a fractured society, but there is another element that forces it into the madness. Remember those brilliant few that I mentioned earlier that designed all of these to fit a certain market, why did they do it? The whole venture was done to exploit that market for profit, which is more or else the American way. The problem for them is eventually you can not exploit your market anymore so you are left with the choice of abandoning it all or simply to retool for a different market. This retooling is what drives our society off kilter. Take for example a local restaurant, The Olde World Restaurant and Lounge. At one point it had a medieval English theme going, the Robin Hood mythos mainly, which was later partly retooled with a general coastal theme and the less said about the names of the special the better. To top this all off at the entrance of parking lot is a Statue of Liberty statue with a giant light in place of the torch. Just as Lady Liberty once welcomed the huddled masses she now greets the befuddled ones.