What a difference a year (or two) makes

“…With those items in mind, I am highly interested in a transfer to our HQ office at 345 Park Avenue in New York City during fiscal year 2011, if such an opportunity is available.  The NYC office is my strongest desire, given a combination of personal and career interests…”

-          - Excerpt from July 2010 email

I have no qualms in admitting it.  I was wrong.  Unequivocally, irrefutably wrong.

I am only twenty-three years old, so admitting these types of things in no ways damages my healthy reservoir of pride.  We all continuously mature and develop over time, and Adam Harpool is no exception to this universal rule.  When I sent back my acceptance letter to the University of Florida in late 2004 as a high school senior, I would have rolled on the floor in laughter had a prescient stranger informed me that I would attend graduate school a few years later in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Two years ago in November 2008 – when I was celebrating Obama’s election and freezing my derriere off in Pittsburgh – I would have engaged in even more boisterous laughter had somebody informed me that I might be, yet again, living in the Northeast in 2011.

Indeed, I have no qualms in admitting that as much as I may have accomplished relative to most of my peers born in 1987, the fact remains that I was born in 1987.  I may be wise for my age, but I am not wise in the grand scheme of things.  Sometimes, I am too brash; sometimes, I say things that I very quickly come to regret.  My fundamental values and character may be rock solid, but all of the nuanced choices that one makes over the course of quotidian life – those things are, and perhaps always will be, a beautiful work in progress.  I have no wrinkles, no gray hair, and precious few bitter memories of choices which I would prefer to recall for a well-deserved redo.  If my life is to be cast into some cheesy metaphor – a book, perhaps – we have barely finished the introductory chapters.

And as far as I’m concerned, the chapters in which the State of Florida plays a prominent role are now in my past.

Let’s enumerate some basic truths – unyielding constants – things of which most of my readers here are likely already aware.  

I am an atheist who has not attended a church service since my elementary school days.  I am an openly gay man.  I am a social democrat in terms of political orientation, and since first exploring the political system in the late 1990’s as a young kid, the only change in my political beliefs has been a steady, incessant shift leftward.  My parents were quintessential liberals of the 1970’s epoch, and my grandparents were New Deal Democrats.  I am a big city person who religiously reads the daily newspaper, travels frequently, spends an obscene amount of money on coffee, finds the idea of private gun ownership to be a tad backwards and baffling, and would never live in a neighborhood without sidewalks and a heavy dose of cultural diversity.

And, perhaps most importantly in the development of the character attributes noted above, I was raised primarily in an extremely conservative, extremely religious region of the country – Northwestern Florida.  Those harsh memories of my younger days – from 1987 to roughly 2004 – will stay with me for the rest of my life:  The neighbor who once, totally unsolicited, offered to me the view that blacks and whites should not inter-marry; the white classmate in elementary school who seemed shocked when I suggested in youthful jest that we date, since in her words “white kids can’t date black kids”; the city council member who once referred to my single parent, independent mother as a transvestite; the church members who distributed pamphlets outside of school on Halloween warning us to not participate in that “Satanist ritual”; the countless folks who told my family to “go back North”; the individuals who did their very best, day in and day out, to transform my young life into a living hell.  That I never once engaged in a physical fistfight while growing up in that region is a scenario which veers far into the long tails of the normal distribution.  Though it has been years since I have stepped foot in that community – and I likely never will again in my life – those memories persist, and always will.  Just as the backgrounds of my parents – both of whom came of age in a still-segregated, Vietnam Era America – fundamentally shaped their lifelong worldviews, so did mine.  These are fundamental, longstanding principles, not youthful whims.  These are the things that have not changed since my earliest years, and I might humbly suggest are not likely to change so long as my lungs intake oxygen and my heart pumps blood.  Those memories drive everything that I was then, am now, and desire to become in the future.

When I was growing up in Northwestern Florida, I recognized the stark division in my home state from a rather early age.  If you are even slightly familiar with Florida, you are likely aware that the further south one penetrates through the state, the more and more a native Deep Southern culture fades into a polyglot, pluralistic culture overwhelmingly dominated by domestic migrants from the American Northeast and immigrants from Latin America, Europe, Israel, and many other regions.   Indeed, the cultural, social, and political differences between South Florida and the far northwestern corner of this state are about as stark as the differences between rural southern Alabama and Boston.   Those differences transcend, by leagues, simple matters of liberal versus conservative, sectarian versus mosaic-like.  Take just about any attribute of North Florida life – other than those very primitive things that truly do bond us all together as Americans – and you will find that the nature of that attribute in South Florida is on the polar opposite end of the spectrum.   There are certainly some notable exceptions – I sometimes feel a slight tinge of paranoia when driving through South Florida’s community of Davie, with its proud “rebel” reputation, and Tallahassee stands out as an educated, progressive city despite sharing a northern border with Georgia – but the “two Florida’s” dichotomy is largely a clear cut, unambiguous one.  If you harbor any doubts about that, I would merely ask that you look at any election map of Florida over the last 20 years; the cultural split is not as much a simple divide as a wide chasm.

As a younger person who harbored a bitter hatred of Northwestern Florida, my crucial mistake was clinging to the seemingly logical, intuitive belief – shaped, perhaps, by a healthy dose of youthful naïveté - that escaping the regressive culture of Northern Florida simply required moving to a different, more enlightened region of the state.  It certainly seems simple enough, doesn’t it?  And on paper at least, it seems to be true.  My tranche of Broward County is highly educated – around 40% of the adult population has an undergraduate degree or higher, compared to less than 10% of the population in the region where I grew up.  My voting precinct has not supported a single Republican candidate in the last 20 years, and gave Obama close to 70% of the vote in the 2008 election (along with rejecting, by over 60%, an anti-gay marriage resolution that won overwhelming support in most of the rest of the state.)  In living here for nearly a year, I could still count on one hand the number of conservatives whom I have encountered.  Jews in Broward County outnumber Evangelical Christians by nearly two to one, and people here overwhelmingly stay quiet about their religious preferences, whatever they may be; religious proselytizing is par for the course in most of Florida, but would be heavily frowned upon here.  Broward County has Florida’s largest LGBT population, and is one of the only counties in the state to prohibit all forms of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as offering a domestic partnership registry.

Surely, many people would read that last paragraph and conclude that I have arrived at Shangri-La.  And when I first arrived back here in January of this year, after driving more than 17 hours through enormous swathes of frozen, snow-covered America, I assumed the same.  It was 70 degrees in January and I was surrounded by like-minded people – hadn’t I finally made it?

In a word – which came as quite a shock to me – the answer was no.  After being generally miserable due to climate factors in the Northeast for much of the last two years, and celebrating with ebullient joy my arrival back in Florida, I found myself in late July of this year applying for a transfer to New York City – right back to the epicenter of the very Northeast which I had just left.

In any state, there are always some people who are more mobile than others.  Regardless of external factors, there are some people who simply do not relocate.  Among those who do relocate, however, a variety of factors play a role.  For most of American history, economics served as the primary catalyst for intra-national population transfers; rural African Americans fled the Jim Crow South for economic opportunity in the Northeast and Midwest, just as subsistence farmers fled the Great Plains for California during the Dust Bowl.  In post-1960’s America, however, a new paradigm has emerged in which a variety of non-economic factors serve as the primary drivers of regional population shifts (for an excellent book on this subject, I would recommend The Big Sort by Bill Bishop.)

Economic factors certainly count among the items driving me out of South Florida.  The region’s low-tech, tourism-driven economy is far from ideal for those of us building our careers in management and technology consulting (and I might note that the region’s retarded growth in “knowledge economy” sectors requiring high levels of education is largely a result of regressive political and economic values forced on it by politicians in other areas of Florida.)  Beyond doubt, I believe that the powerful, global, dynamic economy of New York City will offer me a far better shot at reaching the pinnacles of career success than the provincial economy of Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach.   However, at most I would estimate that purely economic factors account for about 30% of my decision to pursue relocation.  Overwhelmingly this decision comes down to values, and two simultaneous realizations:  the first being that my values are irreconcilably out of sync with mainstream Florida values (and will remain so into the future, barring the sudden, massive influx of another 3 million moderate-to-liberal citizens into this state); and the second, most important realization being that living in urbanized, liberal, diverse South Florida does not provide any type of protection against the imposition, through state law, of regressive values by hyper-conservative, predominantly rural, and culturally monolithic North Floridians.  I came to these realizations less than six months after moving back here; watching Florida elect ultra-conservatives Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, while also handing Republicans super-majorities in the state legislature, was merely the final straw that broke the camel’s back.

The differences could not be clearer.  I want to live in a state where I pay a decent, fair amount of state taxes and receive quality investments by my state in education, infrastructure, and social services in return; most Floridians want to live in a state where they pay no taxes and have a minimalist government which does little more than police their gated communities.  I want to live in a state where immigrants are welcomed; most Floridians have welcomed instead a vicious demagoguery against Latino immigrants, and have expressed a desire to introduce Arizona-style racial profiling laws.  I want to live in a state where religion is a purely private matter that influences no political or policy decisions; most Floridians want to live in a state that shows great deference for “god-fearing” politicians.   I want to live in a state where the fact that I am a gay man does not in any way abrogate my civil liberties or basic rights; most Floridians support policies and politicians that would bar me from adopting children, marrying the person of my choice, and even teaching in public schools.

It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that not a single one of those statements above about “most Floridians” apply to the average people in my neighborhood (Jacaranda), my city (Plantation), my county (Broward), or my metro area (South Florida.)  But the average Floridian voice is not that of a liberal from Plantation or Miami Beach; it is that of a hyper-conservative from Seminole County or Pensacola.

Consider the hordes of predominantly conservative Californians who have fled that state over the last few decades.  California is on the other end of the political scale from Florida, but there are certainly many conservative enclaves in that vast state – the Central Valley and Orange County, just to name two.  However, residents in the conservative Central Valley and Orange County share a state government with Los Angeles County and the Bay Area – extremely populous regions where people with my social and political inclinations run the show.  Faced with this reality, hundreds of thousands of these California conservatives have fled the state to more welcoming regions such as Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado.  And though our worldviews may be fundamentally different, what I am doing is precisely the same thing.

I hate the weather in the Northeast; snow has little beauty to me, and being able to wear shorts and flip-flops in January just as well as July has an undeniable appeal.  I love my beaches, my palm trees, my violent summer thunderstorms and my gentle 60-degree winter nights.  But the most profound shift in my maturity over the last year has been the realization of just how downright silly it is to base long-term location choices on something as trivial as the weather. 

Are you ready?  At this point, I would even choose a dense, urban neighborhood of Pittsburgh – such as Oakland or Shadyside – over 90% of the regions of this state.  You may kindly pick your jaws off of the floor.  Life is a beautiful process of coming to find yourself, coming to find your true priorities, a process to which no person is immune.

Nearly three decades ago, my parents left their native lands behind to seek new opportunities in the Sunshine State.  As much as their lives and experiences may have shaped my schema, I am not them; this was their state, but it will not be mine.  The timing of the next phase of my life may as of yet be uncertain, but the long-term trajectory is now quite clear.

At 23 years, I have matured, and will continue to do so. I am so incredibly proud that readers of this blog have witnessed firsthand a part of this process.  I have lived in Red America, Blue America, the essence of urbanity, and the true backwaters of our nation.   And if the choice is to be made between one state that receives copious amounts of snow and another state that is dominated by Christian conservatives, please hand me the shovel and some salt.