Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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June 22
The Palm Beach Post calling on local leaders to speak out against alleged racist incidents:
“You do not deserve to be in here.”
Those eight words, yelled by 60-year-old white man at 15-year-old Black girl, are hateful. They may stay with the Wellington teenager for the rest of her life. Making her question her self-worth. Haunting every last bit of her future success.
We truly hope not. But such is the stench of the pervasive racism woven into the fabric of our society. Once such undisguised hatred is hurled, its effluvium clings, no matter how much is done to wash it away.
We don’t want this here.
It needs to be said in a collective voice. Loud and clear.
We don’t want what happened in Wellington’s upscale Grand Isles neighborhood, when Lee Jeffers, apparently upset that Breonna Nelson-Hicks was driving a golf cart in the road with some other teens (a rite of passage in most of our suburbs), harassed and scared the teens with his car, then went on a tirade.
“You don’t belong in this development,” he told Breonna, apparently unaware that she lived there with her grandparents, two of Wellington’s first black residents.
Jeffers, ironically, is a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services analyst.
Unfortunately, he is far from alone. Earlier this month, Boynton Beach city officials were forced to terminate their fire chief and public arts manager after a mural depicting the likeness of Boynton’s first (and only) black female deputy fire chief was covered in “white face” - allegedly at Fire Chief Matthew Petty’s direction.
And we hear the pained words of Jupiter Farms resident Brandi Kennedy, who helped organize a peaceful protest against racial inequality in her community last Monday. Kennedy told of the vitriol directed at her and her family: One man repeatedly walked by their home with a Confederate flag. Someone shot out their basketball hoop. People asked whether their home is some sort of halfway house.
Our local elected community leaders must speak out publicly. Wellington Mayor Anne Gerwig, Boynton Beach Mayor Steven Grant and County Mayor David Kerner have all been disappointingly quiet in the wake of these incidents.
That needs to change. At this time of a national reckoning on racial injustice, the mayors’ silence on these incidents is deafening.
Local leadership doesn’t end at deciding tough zoning issues. Leadership also means standing with citizens who are harassed, or made to feel less than, just because of their skin color.
Online: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/
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June 20
The Tampa Bay Times on Florida’s unemployment rate:
From the pandemic to the pocketbook, policy-makers and regular people need to make important decisions right now based on flawed and incomplete data. That’s just the way it is. But they can’t use the excuse of uncertainty to cherry-pick the numbers to draw the conclusions they want - and they need to be open to changing their minds.
Take the state jobs numbers that came out Friday. They’re flawed. No one meant them to be that way, and there’s nothing nefarious going on. But they are misleading in some cases and flat-out wrong in others.
The shortcomings highlight what will be an ongoing challenge during the pandemic. We need to make important and life-altering decisions based on shaky and fast-changing information, whether it be how to interpret the recent spike in coronavirus cases or how the crisis is influencing the economy.
The lesson: We must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were.
Let’s start with the basics. The unemployment rate in Florida jumped from 13.8% in April to 14.5% in May. That wouldn’t be surprising given our current circumstances, except that the national rate fell from month to month.
Why did Florida’s rate rise? A massive number of people - 237,000 - came back to the workforce after temporarily dropping out - meaning they weren’t working or looking for work. Some of them found jobs, or returned to their previous ones. Others didn’t.
The result: More people were employed in May, but a higher percentage of the returning workers were still looking for work, which caused the unemployment rate to rise. In some ways that’s not so bad. An expanding labor force signals that people feel confident they can find work.
Here’s where the numbers get shaky. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conceded that in recent months it misclassified people as “employed, but absent from work,” instead of “unemployed, on temporary furlough,” a hiccup that stems from how the crisis quickly altered the job status of millions of workers nationwide. Without the miscalculation, the official unemployed rate would be higher.
Plus, about 800,000 people in Florida are still missing from the workforce compared to February. There’s no way they all decided to retire. Most of them likely want to work, but they aren’t looking for a job, so they aren’t officially counted among the unemployed.
Add in the missing workers and Florida’s unemployment rate in May would be about 21%, though that is down from above 22% in April. Both numbers are stunningly high, but it shows how the uptick in the official unemployment rate is saying that things got worse in May, when they likely got a little better, said Michael Farren, an economist and research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
The official “definition of unemployment was not developed to accommodate a pandemic,” he said.
The takeaway shouldn’t be that the job numbers are useless. In fact, the report is based on a monthly survey of tens of thousands of people, crunched by an army of dedicated federal employees. Some economists call it the “gold standard” in monthly data collection.
Therein lies the point - the pandemic has even upset one of the most reliable ways of measuring the health of the economy. But the numbers were never perfect, just like the way we count coronavirus cases won’t be perfect. We use the best available information and adapt as the information changes. There is too much at stake for paralysis.
Online: https://www.tampabay.com/
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June 19
The Miami Herald on people who don’t wear masks amid the Coronavirus pandemic:
To the people out and about and unmasked: How dare you!
Are you too cool, too important, too invincible to get COVID-19? Or are you out to make a political statement?
“Hey hey, ho ho, these masks have to go!” is a chant heard in some circles.
How selfish. How arrogant. Remember, it’s not only about you.
That has never been more true than today, as coronavirus cases climb and hospital ICU beds fill up. Now is not the time for reckless behavior in the name of politics or self-absorption.
On Wednesday, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez acknowledged worsening COVID-19 numbers and pointed to an obvious culprit: “Some people are being a little too comfortable about not wearing masks.” That’s an understatement. Especially, since the state of Florida has posted a record number of confirmed coronavirus cases in four of the last seven days.
Thursday, Florida reported 3,207 new cases, the most ever recorded in a single day. That the number of new cases was so alarming that Gimenez ordered Miami-Dade Police to more strictly enforce the must-wear-a-mask mandate.
Putting police in the mix is the right thing to do. However, their involvement should not be used as an excuse for officers to overreact, to be abusive. The crackdown should be administered equitably and with level heads - all over town.
And all residents who are flagged should comply.
Gimenez has pulled back from a warning that he would re-close businesses if they didn’t enforce emergency coronavirus rules requiring customers to wear masks.
By Thursday, Miami-Dade County’s confirmed cases shot up by 581 to 23,854. The county now has at least 859 deaths, which is the highest total in all of Florida.
And Herald analysis show that it’s highly unlikely those rampaging numbers are only because of increased testing.
MIAMI BEACH LAPSES
Even Miami Beach has slipped. It’s not enforcing its own rules mandating face masks or physical distancing at the beach when people are with non-family members.
And some people are making a statement:
A Miami travel agent wants a judge to strike down Miami-Dade’s emergency orders requiring people to wear masks while visiting businesses, claiming the emergency COVID-19 rules are too vague to be enforced and wrongly infringe on constitutional freedoms.
Sorry, but people who don’t wear masks are endangering all of us.
Are they so self-absorbed that it doesn’t matter to them?
Several studies have confirmed that wearing the right mask significantly cuts the coronavirus transmission rate. It is simply everyone’s responsibility to protect each other. It’s the same as reporting suspected child abuse, or a drunk driver careening down the expressway.
We know that South Floridians just want their old lives back. That day will come far sooner if they just put on their damn masks.
Online: https://www.miamiherald.com/
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