Floridian Evolution

I grew up in a town called Atlantic Beach, FL, outside Jacksonville. Right next door is a mall that demands it receive township recognition, and goes by the name Orange Park. Below there's a nice link to give you a picture of what the intellectual climate's like. It's a dandy article in the New York Times concerning the fact that Florida has just now implemented evolution as part of its curriculum.

In any event, this is essentially the attitude towards science with which I grew up in the Duval County public school system. Granted, I went to an arts high school, so my science teachers had the leeway to pepper their lessons with unconventional approaches to the universe and its myriad quandaries.

For instance, on the first day of my junior year of high school I entered the world of physics, accompanied by a cranky Santa Claus lookin' mother named Mr. Bartolett. At the start of class he walrused his way to the front, clutching a single red brick in his hand. Holding it aloft, he waited in bitter silence for many calculated moments before letting the brick fall to the hard floor with a resounding BAM. He pointed to it and stared up at us.

"Gravity," he said. "I hope you enjoyed your lab for the year. Take out your notebooks."

I seem to recall that his first name was Frank.

Florida is not, as my friend Erica would have you believe, one of the ten worst US states. True, it might be one of the fifteen worst US states, but I believe it easily outclasses Indiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Utah, and Ohio simply by virtue of its coastline. I am biased, having experienced a magically-realistic childhood in its swamps and on its shore, and part of me still misses a life dictated by storms. But also understand that I fled at age eighteen and never looked back.

Part of the reason I knew I could never be a Floridian amphibian was the requirement that residents exist both in the hippy water and on the Christian shore, one of the rocky Baptist variety. Jacksonville has a long and proud history of religious intolerance, my two favorite examples of which are the lighthouse structure in downtown J-Ville that shines its holy light on the nearby sinners (inner city black neighborhoods) and an incident after 9/11 when the minister of First Baptist Church, a young man named Jerry Vines, called Mohammed, the founder of Islam, a demon possessed pedophile.

I simply lacked the lungs for breathing bullshit. There's a rigidity to religious belief to which I cannot adapt. I think the human experience is too fluid to be governed by any one power or school of thought, particularly one that negates human instinct as sin and the scientific process as atheistic spite.

The main complaint of Christian students being taught evolution is that they certainly didn't come from apes. I don't understand the idea that descent from apes is somehow an insult, that to consider the possibility is to somehow remove grace from humanity. Are apes so unsavory? As a linguist I've always admired them. Koko managed to communicate on our terms, in a form of English. How many humans can communicate on hers? Isn't transcending language barriers a sign of grace if a condemnation and punishment from God was the splitting of Babel? Or is it simply a move towards a displeasing Unity in the eyes of God? After all, He found a single form of communication the height of threatening behavior.

Speaking of unity, and those struggling to find a common language, Michelle Obama opened the Democratic National Convention with a lovely speech. Perhaps she hit a few points too heavily for my taste (You love America? No shit.), but one thing she mentioned struck me. She discussed how often those who make it out of a forsaken community so rarely return to improve it. When I've thought about living in Florida full time, which has not been often, I've usually dismissed the idea with a full body shudder and the better part of a bottle of Makers. Aside from the personal gripes I have against my home state, even now, in a climate of Barack Obama, I remember the sheer shame of Florida's part in the 2000 election, and I have a hard time defending its place out of the US's bottom ten. Florida, the lovely, tan drunk driver that made George W. Bush's presidency possible, your sins are far greater than being a bedrock for the spiritually smug. But progress is a process, and the challenging of creationism is a good step.

I can only hope the students benefitting from this development internalize their education's evolution. Painful as it may be, they are witnessing the Florida public school system growing an opposable thumb, one that may point up at God or down at the facts, one capable of the noblest of actions: grasping.

I'd just love to feel at home there again. For once.