Clash of The Retirees & The Working Class

If you’ve never had the pleasure of navigating Florida’s roads, you’ve truly missed out on a unique blend of road rage and bewilderment. It is such an anomaly that Google can’t even calculate your arrival time. I didn’t know algorithms could have seizures until I tried to map my way from St. Petersburg to downtown Tampa (through “malfunction junction”, as they call it).

Floridians drive with complete lack of purpose…so slow, they must post a minimum speed limit on its interstates… so aimlessly, there are arrows painted on the roads at continuous intervals to remind folks what direction they were going.

That should at least mean it’s safer, right? Wrong! Accidents are so prevalent, 93% of billboards are advertisements for accident/injury lawyers. The highways are consistently lined with damaged vehicles and tow trucks. Police don’t even bother to turn off their lights anymore.

But how? Why?

That ladies and gentlemen is what I aim to discover.

The “how” is the easy one: it’s a clash of the senior community’s refusal to accept the fact that there are people that have jobs and its counterpart, the unacknowledged working class. I found out firsthand how dangerous this can be.

It was 7 am and still dark. I had just got off my shift at the Red Cross and was driving back to camp on I75, going 75 mph in a 70-mph zone. I saw the rear lights of a vehicle 100 feet or so ahead of me. I looked down to see how close I was to the I275 exit and when I looked back up, I had to slam on my breaks! The wheels screeched and my heart skipped a beat. The guy was going 43 fucking-miles-per-hour on the interstate!

Why is this happening?

I asked some local retirees if they had considered the strain they put on folks trying to commute to and from work. One senior replied, “Oh, that’s just fake news”. When asked why he drove, his response was even more appalling- birdwatching!

“It’s the easiest way to catch multiple species of bird”, he said.

This is a common belief & lifestyle amongst the senior community. They refuse to accept the fact that some people have places to go. And that belief has spread at an incredible rate. New residents are unwittingly being fed this rhetoric and officials don’t know how to stop it.

One local officer provided some insight, explaining, “You typically lose about 5 mph of speed each month once you become a resident. If you’re lucky, you’ll bottom out within the first year.” When I inquired about how this peculiar phenomenon spreads, he mused, “The seniors don’t seem to use any technology we understand.”

After an extensive investigation however, probing the local community, I believe I have discovered some of the means in which this is happening: something called a “landline” and “USPS” (an acronym assumed to help conceal its identity).  I am also convinced there is subliminal messaging embedded in the retirement checks somehow.

How this group continues to lure people into its life of nonchalance so rapidly, no one knows. What we do know is that is the only thing moving rapidly in the entire state of Florida.