They can keep the name. And I suppose -- if they let us go our own way without a fuss -- they can keep the billions stolen from folks down this way since Henry Flagler built his railroad.
But it's high time, after a century of getting fleeced by those crackers in Tallahassee, that we said goodbye to Florida.
The Miami Herald's Gary Fineout provided fresh grounds for divorce when he dissected the 2007 budget and found that Miami-Dade and Broward counties contributed $7.15 billion to the state's revenue collection. Meanwhile, the state sent $6.69 billion back our way.
The 2008 budget looks even bleaker. Miami-Dade and Broward schools, with about 22 percent of the state's student population, get stiffed with 38 percent of the budget cuts.
TIME TO GO
It's time we got out.
Not that secession is such an original idea. Back in 1945, George Okell, a state representative from Miami, pushed for a vote to petition Congress to carve a 49th state out of a region tired of getting robbed by an all-powerful cracker contingent in the Legislature.
On June 9, 1945, a Miami Herald editorial championed secession, noting that ``the thinking, the living, the geography, the habits of the two sections are decidedly different.''
Legislators from rural North Florida counties with less than 15 percent of the state's total population had maintained a majority in both the House and Senate since 1885. North Florida's ruling clique, the so-called Pork Chop Gang, wielded all the power while South Florida provided two-thirds of the state's tax collections.
Tallahassee shorted South Florida on roads, services and higher education.
After the 1926 hurricane ruined Miami and again after the 1928 hurricane caused Lake Okeechobee to burst through its levee in Palm Beach County, the state skimped on storm relief. State Atty. Gen. Fred Henry Davis, testifying before Congress in 1928, explained, ``It's mighty hard to get people in other parts of the state interested in people from South Florida, as to whether they perish or not.''
CRACKERS STILL ON TOP
Davis told Congress that North Florida residents would just as soon ''build a wall down there'' to ``keep the Yankees out.''
Attitudes haven't changed much. Except the antipathy toward Yankees has been expanded to include a number of ethnic groups.
But however stingy North Floridians have been with our money, the Pork Chop Gang has always been generous with their Old South cultural values.
They long championed an uncompromising brand of segregation and, in the 1950s, created the infamous Johns Committee (after Senate president and Joe McCarthy wannabe Charley Johns of Starke), bent on cleansing colleges of liberals, gays and integrationists.
In 1967, the Supreme Court supposedly put an end to redneck rule in Florida, ordering Senate and House districts reapportioned by population.
SHOW US THE MONEY
Reapportionment was supposed to bring fairness to the budgeting process. It hasn't worked out so well. South Florida's quarrelsome legislators, even with a House speaker from Miami, still can't get us a fair return for our taxes.
But the crackers are as generous as ever with their cultural values. In lieu of money, the 2008 Legislature has given us creationism in science classrooms, crucifixes on license plates and guns at work.
It's as if the Pork Chop Gang still ruled. After 100 years of this nonsense, maybe it's time to say, ``So long, Florida.''
