The Unhappiest Place on Earth
By: Liz Rios Hall
Tags: Orlando, Disney, Covid 19, Culture, Florida

Life in Orlando has lost its sparkle. We’re living through what seems like a losing battle with the Covid-19 coronavirus. Another day brings another grim reminder of the pandemic’s toll on our community: As I write this, I hear that 186 people died here yesterday, a new single-day record. More than 6,100 people in our state and counting have died from the virus in the last few months. Almost 442,000 of us have contracted the disease. And then there are the millions of Floridians who are out of work because of its impact on the economy. Along with the Covid case numbers, our state’s unemployment numbers have climbed to record highs. Orlando’s economy has been one of the hardest-hit in the state. Our community is suffering. Our family has cut ourselves off from almost everyone and everything we know, and we are suffering. Like so many others here, and elsewhere, I am exhausted by it all.

A couple of days ago, in a rare free moment, I opened the Atlantic to see if I could find some good news to help ease the pain. Instead, I found this story. As Floridians fight for our lives against a virus that has infected more of us than entire populations of other countries, the Atlantic sent a staff writer here — not to cover the impact of the pandemic on Floridians but to vacation at Disney World. And he wrote a story about it in which he imagines that our record-high Covid case count is “a source of secret pride” for Floridians “as if they had set a record for fattest alligator or ugliest serial killer or most senior citizens in a golf cart.” Wait, did I read that right?! I did.

It takes a lot to get me mad, but Wood’s unthinking, unfeeling words infuriated me. I spent the rest of my day rage-snacking, internally scream-cursing and trying to distract my 4-year-old daughter from my anger by crafting away my feelings while we were stuck in the same room we’ve spent the last five months in…because outside the magical world of Disney that Graeme Wood invents in his fairy tale, real Floridians like me are dealing with the reality of living in one of the world’s biggest Covid hotspots and all the anxiety, loneliness and stress that has spawned. And we’re doing it while this guy enjoys a ride on Space Mountain.

“There’s a strange tension here between imaginary fantasy lands like Disney, where some of us pretend to be fake characters for your enjoyment, and the real Orlando, where we live as flesh-and-blood people. This friction has peaked during the pandemic, as some of us are forced to put our lives on the line to entertain the tourists we rely on for our livelihoods.”

The real story of the “Unhappiest Place on Earth”

Let’s just ignore the obvious ethical irresponsibility of sending a writer on assignment to a city where the coronavirus is raging at an all-time high, a place that same writer calls “America’s Yemen,” so that he can, as he put it: “take rides, eat corn dogs and wait in line,” while miles away Floridians die.

Let’s ignore that while he’s doing those things the hundreds of unnamed, working-class cast members who serve him are silently hoping they stay alive long enough to take their minimum-wage paychecks home to their families so they don’t get evicted or starve because many of these workers were struggling financially even before Covid hit Orlando. That is, the cast members who still work at Disney since the corporation furloughed 70,000 local employees, who are now depending on the state’s infamously unreliable benefits system to survive. (I’m “imagineering” this part of the story, though, since all of these real Floridians are invisible in Wood’s tall tale, of course.)

And let’s especially ignore how this man spent his vacation judging everyone around him and making derisive, unsubstantiated remarks about Floridians that he then published in a major American media outlet. Because, you know, why not kick us when we’re really, really down and then broadcast it to the world?

Let’s focus, instead, on the wild, some might even say deadly, inaccuracies in Wood’s piece, which isn’t so much a feel-good story as it is a venomous rant about why Disney is the worst place in the world. Wood begins by complaining that people in the Orlando airport aren’t wearing masks. Specifically, he points out a Midwestern family that doesn’t feel obligated to wear masks here because, as Wood puts it, “in this place there is no law.” Here Wood dredges up the old cliché that Florida is the Wild West, a place where anything goes, that it’s “anarchy” here, as he later puts it.

In reality, we do have laws. One of those laws is you have to wear a mask, which has been mandatory in Orange County — home of the Orlando International Airport, Disney and Orlando — since June 20, 2020. All airport staff have also been required to wear masks and other protective gear since mid-June when travel began to increase again. And passengers on major airlines have been required to wear masks since early June, too. Another Florida law is that tourists who enter the state from certain places, like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, are supposed to self-quarantine for 14 days to contain the spread of the disease and keep Floridians safe. I wonder if Wood followed that law or if he broke it because he doesn’t think rules apply here.

If Wood would have done his research, then he would have recognized the people he saw without masks in the airport and the parks probably weren’t from Orlando. They were likely tourists, like him, who seem unaware that even though they are on vacation here, the rest of us aren’t. We must abide by the laws. We must wear masks to protect ourselves. And, apparently, we must do so to protect ourselves from tourists, like that unmasked family from Ohio Wood observed, who don’t believe Florida is a real place with real people who are contracting this virus at alarming rates.

Wood says Disney is a separate world from Orlando, but that’s true only in the most literal sense. As a city, we are dependent on theme parks like Disney, Universal, Sea World and other local tourist attractions for economic support. Almost 19% of our city’s GDP is from tourism, and an estimated 25% of Orlando-area jobs are in the tourism and hospitality sectors, most of which are low-paying service jobs. To put these stats in context, there are only three other cities in the world whose economies rely on tourism more heavily than Orlando’s does. And despite the fact that we’re one of the most visited places on the planet, our workers earn less than any other major metro area in America and we have one of the nation’s worst low-income housing crises.

This creates a strange tension between imaginary fantasy lands like Disney, where some of us pretend to be fake characters for your enjoyment, and the real Orlando, where we live as flesh-and-blood people. This friction has peaked during the pandemic, as some of us are forced to put our lives on the line to entertain the tourists we rely on for our livelihoods.

“Wood ignores the safety, health and well-being of the Floridians who face the impossible choice of staying home safe or making a living serving tourists like him at theme parks where he and these other fantasy-seekers flock ‘to get away from it all.’”

The unseen Orlando: What Wood’s fairy tale ignores

It’s become a raw nerve now, but this tension — between real Floridians and the tourists who see our home as a fantasy land — has been a major theme in Orlando’s untold story since Walt Disney used dummy corporations to secretly buy up thousands of acres of farm and swamp land from unsuspecting Floridians in the 1960s so he could create what is sometimes called “the most magical place on earth.”

As someone who was born and raised in Orlando, it’s a tension I’ve been aware of my whole life. Orlando author Kristen Arnett says this strange liminal space we occupy is “great for tourism and terrible for a sense of place: It means that people call you tacky because your home serves the purpose of entertaining strangers for money.” Of course, as one of the tourists who comes here for entertainment, Wood doesn’t recognize this tension. Indeed, outside of a few minor interactions with local workers, he doesn’t seem to see this place and the people who live here at all.

Wood’s story enraged me for lots of reasons: The reporting is lazy and there’s far more style than substance, at least if you find pseudo-intellectual philosophizing stylish. What bothered me most, though, was his complete lack of perspective. Wood isn’t incapable of taking a critical look at what’s around him. On the contrary, he doles out plenty of judgement in his story. But his critical gaze goes blank when it comes to Orlando and the people who live here. When it comes to us, he just doesn’t seem to care.

For instance, Wood criticizes what he calls Disney’s “problematic” racial insensitivity, which he says is apparent in the “spear-wagging natives with bones through their noses dancing on the shores” of the Jungle Cruise and in the “Chinese Laundry” shop sign in Frontierland. But he ignores the even more problematic dynamic at work in our real city, where the tourism industry relies heavily on lower-income black, brown and Latinx people who work at theme parks that cater to mostly white, mostly middle-class tourists like him. He ignores how many of these Floridians can’t make a living wage while they work in a place where tourists spend thousands of dollars to vacation. Floridians like Gabby Alcantara-Anderson, a Disney cast member whose salary is so low she sometimes sleeps in her car because she can’t afford to buy gas.

Indeed, one of the only times Wood acknowledges there is a real place that exists beyond Disney’s grounds is when he asks readers to think about “the anarchy of Florida,” where he claims “roughly one in 10 citizens has filed paperwork to carry a gun concealed on his person.” But he ignores that Orlando is also where 49 Floridians lost their lives to gun violence, and how that tragedy galvanized our community to fight back against gun violence and bigotry. He ignores Floridians like the survivors of the Parkland shooting, who have become the poster children for gun control in America. He ignores Floridian Sybrina Fulton, whose son Trayvon was murdered in nearby Sanford, and who is now a major advocate for gun reform and racial justice. These Floridians aren’t gun-toting, Second Amendment imbeciles, as Wood would have us believe; they are remarkable people who are leading our country’s fight for gun reform.

Wood then criticizes Florida’s state song, which “until recently still used the word darkies,” as a way of implying that we Floridians are a bunch of racists. But, in doing so, he ignores the millions of black and brown people who call Florida home — We are Floridians, too. In fact, Orlando is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places in the state with two-thirds of our new residents arriving from outside of the mainland U.S. And we are proud to live in a community that recognizes and represents diversity, including among elected officials like Floridians Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings and his wife (potential Biden VP pick) Congresswoman Val Demings, Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, Representative Anna Eskamani and Representative Carlos Guillermo Smith, among many others.

Perhaps most insulting of all, Wood calls Floridians “so ornery that they cannot be persuaded to wrap bandannas around their faces to save their own lives.” He implies that Floridians are so stupid we don’t believe in science, so stubborn we don’t take care of ourselves and so selfish we don’t care about each other. In doing so, he ignores Florida’s healthcare workers and first responders who put their lives on the line to save their fellow Floridians. He ignores Orlando’s local government officials, like those above, who have fought tirelessly to keep us safe and healthy.

He ignores the good people of this state whose lives have been turned upside down by this virus. People who have lost loved ones. People who have gone months without seeing friends or family. People whose children have been stuck at home indoors because there’s nowhere safe to go and they wouldn’t dream of taking their kids to Disney during a pandemic. People who are sacrificing their livelihoods and mental health to save their own lives and the lives of their neighbors. Even worse, Wood ignores the safety, health and well-being of the Floridians who face the impossible choice of staying home safe or making a living serving tourists like him at theme parks where he and these other fantasy-seekers flock “to get away from it all.”

Buried among all these insults is a moment of irony that stands out like a dagger. Wood recalls meeting a woman from New York who is vacationing at Disney, like him: “She said the only other time Disney World had short lines was after 9/11, when no one was quite sure whether terrorists would massacre everyone, or whether the funnel cakes would be dusted with anthrax spores. ‘This is like that,’ she said. ‘A wonderful time to be here.’”

It’s clear from Wood’s tone he is disgusted by this woman. In his eyes, she’s selfish, crude and insensitive. The kind of tone-deaf person who says “All lives matter” instead of “Black lives matter.” The kind of self-involved person who doesn’t recognize the tragedies of others because they’re too wrapped up in their own self-interests. The kind of person whom Wood sees as the symbol for everything that is wrong with Disney (and by proxy America), which he sees as the place where those kinds of people go to escape reality because it doesn’t suit them.

The cutting irony, revealed in Wood’s essay, is that he is that kind of person, too. Despite his impressive pedigree — as a staff writer at one of America’s most respected magazines — he is unable to see beyond his own narrow, navel-gazing perspective. He ignores the reality of this place and the real people who call it home: the people who take his tickets, serve his meals and fluff his hotel pillows. No, not ignores. He doesn’t even see us at all. We are invisible in his story. It makes me wonder: Do we matter?

“Maybe you forget we’re real people because some of us have to dress up in costumes and pretend to be cartoons for your enjoyment so we can earn enough money to survive. Or maybe you like to caricature us because it’s easier to hate a one-dimensional villain than to empathize with real, live human beings.”

This isn’t a fantasy land or a cultural wasteland — It’s my home

This myopic view of Floridians isn’t new or unique to Wood’s story. I’ve seen it in the pages of the New York Times and Time magazine, too. Each time I read these unseeing stories about Florida, I think: What gives these people the right to talk about us as if we don’t exist? Why do they think they can speak for a community they don’t know anything about and very clearly don’t care about? And why are well-respected media platforms like the Times and the Atlantic publishing these fictions? If you want your readers to learn about Florida, then why wouldn’t you just ask an actual Floridian what it’s like to live here? Why is it ok for you to pretend like we aren’t real? To paraphrase Wood (with a thick accent of irony): “Where is the outrage?”

Wood presumes to know Floridians’ secret thoughts. I’m going to let him in on my real ones. I imagine outlets like the Atlantic publish these tired clichés because they don’t really want their readers to think about Florida. They don’t actually want to hear what Floridians think either. The Woods of the world just want to make fun of us so they can feel superior to us. They see Florida as nothing more than a clever metaphor for “dumb America” and its many faults. If my years of experience living in the Northeast taught me anything (debatable), they taught me that nothing makes a New Yorker feel better about himself than shitting on a Floridian. Why?

Maybe it’s because Florida struggles with statewide mental health and drug addiction crises that can cause some of us to do things you enjoy snarking at. Or maybe it’s because many of us are poor and don’t speak your language, so we don’t have the access or resources to clap back at your ridicule, which makes us easy and often silent targets for it.

Maybe you forget we’re real people because some of us have to dress up in costumes and pretend to be cartoons for your enjoyment so we can earn enough money to survive. Or maybe you like to caricature us because it’s easier to hate a one-dimensional villain than to empathize with real, live human beings.

Maybe it’s simply because you’re a classist jerk who thinks we live in a cultural wasteland that is only worth mentioning when you want to scorn or mock it. Or maybe you’re just a tiny bit jealous that we get to live in a state of perpetual sunshine and you want to rain on it a little. I don’t really know. I can’t presume to know the minds of others, and, honestly, I have no desire to inhabit a state of mind as unimaginative as Wood’s and these others who talk about us like we aren’t real.

I doubt the real Wood will ever read this story. But if he, or anyone involved with his vanity fairy tale, or any of the high-profile readers who praised it while missing the real point, does read this and feels remorse, I ask this: Please save the empty “I’m sorry.” I’m tired of hearing people in positions of power apologize for things they should have known better than to do or say in the first place. (And while you’re at it, donate to the Cast Member Pantry, a local organization that provides food to Disney cast members who are struggling to afford it right now. You or your editors just dropped $2,500 on a Disney vacation, Mr. Wood, so I think you can manage to give some cash to the people who served you there.)

Don’t be sorry. Be better. The next time you go to write a story that relies on a stereotype or cliché, don’t. Instead, ask yourself why that stale, old trope exists. Ask yourself whom it serves and why they continue to use it. Ask yourself whom it ignores or renders invisible, and why that matters. Ask whose voice isn’t being heard. And then go talk to those “invisible” people about their lives. Listen with compassion. Make them feel visible. And let their words be the start, the heart, of the story.

Open your eyes, and heart, wider next time you look at us here in your favorite state to hate. And know: We see you looking, and we’re looking right back at you.