Florida

Florida is infamous for being a shit show. It's so infamous for it, it has its own meme rooted in that: Florida Man.

It's perhaps especially alarming given that Florida is a retirement destination. Retirees tend to be a little more financially secure and mentally and emotionally stable than average, yet that's not what we hear about Florida.

There seem to be over fifty Florida Main Street communities. They aren't numbered, so it's challenging to count manually, but with the national website stating there are over 1600 Main Street programs, that should be quite a lot more than average for most states.

Sixteen hundred divided by fifty is thirty two. So probably most states have even less than that given how many extras Florida has.

I'm failing to readily google up a phrase and supporting citations for the phenomenon, but I've had Intro to Psychology and a class in Social Psychology. When things get ugly enough, male leadership trends towards getting paranoid and controlling and not wanting to share information.

They close ranks, make unilateral decisions and don't want to explain their actions. Unsurprisingly, this frequently makes things worse, not better.

Generally speaking, war is rooted in material hardship. War and other kinds of widespread distress and political drama.

I believe it was some Chinese emperor who said something like "If you do a good job running the country, no one thinks you've done anything. They are just happy. But if you do a bad job, everyone blames you and wants your head on a platter."

Something has gone extremely wrong with the US and everyone knows small town America, once a tremendous strength of this country, is in deep distress. Perhaps one reason for that is Main Street America, a program supposedly intended to solve the problem of small town economic development but which doesn't seem to work AT ALL.

In fact, it looks to me like a con game bleeding vulnerable, desperate people in small towns who lack the necessary education and background to readily recognize that this makes no sense through no fault of their own. 

I have the appropriate background and the only skin I have in this game is wanting to be left alone by people in Aberdeen, Washington and it's taken me nearly eight years to conclude that Main Street America is definitely part of the problem. It's not just that people in Aberdeen are loons.

If you are in Florida and tired of your state being the butt of so many ugly jokes for which you have no real rebuttal, maybe float the idea that Main Street doesn't work and should be run out of the state. 

You should probably make sure to mention there are other options to help soften the blow and help get people on board with contemplating the possibility that the state might be fixable and step one might be excising the economic cancer called Main Street America.

Footnote 

I'm medically handicapped and had a bad night and woke up to news that Robert Redford has died. Coming on the heels of Graham Greene's death on the first of this month, September 2025 is looking like a very bad month to me.

And then I tripped across this post by a guy in Florida fed up with his state and the extremist garbage around him. And I began wondering just how many Main Street America programs the state has. 

It has a LOT. Way too many if you ask me. Given that I believe the program bleeds small towns of their limited resources and crowds out better answers, I very much believe this has got to be a source of enormous distress for a state best known for being a bit unhinged.