805: The Florida Experiment
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A quick warning - there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Just needed to desk good knows exactly when she got the idea to leave suburban New Jersey and move to a different state. It was still at the height of COVID. Her second grader was doing remote learning. The vaccine had barely been introduced, and most people couldn't get it. She was working from home, and her son's class took a snack break. So we would usually go into the kitchen, grab a snack, and on the TV was, of course, hot snooze, and the dentist was on the TV talking about the pandemic and how he disapproved of how other states were handling things, and he said, he goes, "Well, you know, we're handling things so differently. If you're not happy in the state you live in, come to Florida, we welcome you here." If you look at home sales, I mean, it's pretty clear that people are viewing Florida as a landing pad. When we looked up the clip, the dentist didn't exactly tell people to move to Florida, but the ETA just took it that way. You know, Tucker, it's interesting, as this went on, I would encounter people, particularly in September, that would move from parts of the country, say, "Look, they closed our schools. I want your schools are open. I'm going to come here because you guys are doing it right." I really do think these lockdowns have driven some people to Florida who just had enough with these draconian, ineffective restrictions. It was, I don't know, with like, music to our ears, and I thought about it for a second. I'm like, "Do you want to imagine us, like, living in Florida? Could we do it? Could we just pick up everything and move?" The big thing she wanted, in-person learning, for a son, for Dennison Alinda Michael, in the small town in Washington state, was a story on NBC News around the same time that did the job. The story was about a grocery store in Naples, Florida, and it was a hit piece on them because everybody was walking around the store without their mask on. In fact, the reporter in the story reads comments from people who saw a video of this story online. "Prompting mostly heavy criticism. I can't stop watching this. My jaw is literally on my desk. This should be a crime. People across the country are dying because of behavior like this, and from a woman mourning her father's death from COVID." And I thought that's the place I want to be. Wait, wait, wait. I just want to be sure I understand. There was this story on television saying, "Look how terrible these people are. You're walking around without masks, and you saw that, and you concluded, 'That's where I want to be. The terrible people part I ignored, because it looked to me like there were people that were enjoying life, and it just was a sense of freedom that we didn't have in Washington state."
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