Faced with skyrocketing infection rates and questions regarding his decision to re-open the state despite alarming data trends, Florida Governor DeSantis chooses division over compassion, scapegoating over science…
Governor blames “overwhelmingly Hispanic” farmworkers, and crowded living and working conditions beyond their control, for sharp rise in new COVID-19 cases, rather than ask if his own actions — and inaction — might have contributed to the dramatic increase in suffering and death among farmworkers in his state;
CIW’s Silvia Perez: “Our community is very small so when a worker loses their life, the community notices and comes together to raise money to help send the worker back to their home country,” she said. “When you hear those comments, it’s like … why does he not value us?”
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, leader of a state hard hit by the novel coronavirus, makes it a practice to read the eulogies of three victims of COVID-19 as part of his regular press conferences on the pandemic. Black, white, Latino, people of every race, background, and occupation are paid this simple, but moving, respect by the state’s chief executive as a way to underscore the horrible human cost of the deadly virus. His inclusive tributes are a poignant reminder that the loss of one person to this pandemic diminishes us all, and that our best hope in the fight against this existential threat is to remain firmly united.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, on the other hand, takes a decidedly different approach to the reckoning required of him as the leader of a state quickly becoming the new national epicenter of the pandemic. His public statements over the past week reveal a far less compassionate, more divisive strategy for addressing the growing crisis in the Sunshine State.
When asked during a recent press conference whether his decision to precipitously re-open the state might have contributed to the sharp rise of new COVID-19 cases in Florida — where this past week saw one record high after another — Governor DeSantis decided to point the finger instead at some of his poorest and least powerful constituents:
“I think the No. 1 outbreak we’ve seen is in the agriculture communities,” he said. “There was just a big case dump in North Central Florida there was a watermelon farm. You’ve had farm communities in Collier, Palm Beach, Martin, Levy, Hendry, and what happens is these are workers that are working close together once one gets it, it tends to spread very rapidly throughout those areas.”
What he said next cast a stark light on the mindset governing decision-making in Tallahassee since the first days of the pandemic, and revealed perhaps the real reason behind the current spike in cases in Immokalee and other farmworker communities:
“You don’t want those folks mixing with the general public if you have an outbreak,” Mr. DeSantis said last week, infuriating longtime community activists who say the answer is not to isolate an already overlooked population but rather to help improve its working and housing conditions.
Finally, Governor DeSantis took the opportunity during a subsequent press conference to underscore the ethnicity of the people he was choosing to single out as the principal cause of the sharp rise in new cases, declaring, apropos of nothing:
“They’re also looking at construction workers and other types of day laborers, they’re finding these are overwhelmingly Hispanic workers and day laborers, but they were in Northwest Florida (where they) found a couple cases,” he said.
Despite what many political observers are now calling his premature decision to re-open the state — and despite what virtually all medical observers decry as a totally inadequate effort to provide contact tracing and isolation resources to communities fighting the deadly virus — the most powerful man in Florida has chosen to blame the state’s least powerful residents for the surge in new COVID-19 cases. And — though absolutely no one asked — he has drawn a sharp dividing line between those workers and what he calls “the general population,” even going as far as to highlight the ethnicity of the farmworkers and other low-wage workers whom he has chosen to scapegoat.
