In the wake of Hurricane Irma, a rather dumb argument has been flooding my Facebook feed, a digital medium which is to dumb arguments what orchards are to apples. It goes a little something like this:
If you evacuated Miami, you no longer get to call yourself “305,” bro.
That’s the thesis of it, at least—give or take a few misspelled expletives and oddly used emojis.
This is, of course, dumb—on so many levels. Even now, as I sit writing this on the verge of madness in a powerless house that is, at best, 1,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit, I cannot make sense of it. A very (very) small part of me understands the logic, though: they left. You stayed. Boo them, the cowards with full tanks of gas. Yay us, the heroes with plywood, hurricane shutters and enough bottled water to fill a Jacuzzi. Let us now laugh as they fight their way through hours of traffic to return to homes they love that may or may not be badly damaged and flooded. Ha. Ha?
It’s a tempting but dangerous sort of herd mentality that is, granted, being championed by only a small but vocal group of Miamians. Still, it deserves to be called out.
The reasons why we either stayed or fled are diverse and vary based on financial means, family ties, transportation, geography and a thousand other tiny factors that come into play during a looming disaster. Neither is right. Neither is wrong.
You cannot shame a person who evacuated Miami in the days before Irma any more than you can shame a person who left a building after hearing a fire alarm. How can you blame someone for making a rational decision? And, by that logic, how far does the path to being truly, authentically “Miami” extend? What’s next?
Bro, you can’t call yourself “305” if you put up shutters for the hurricane! Bro, you can’t call yourself 305 if you stayed inside for the hurricane! Bro, you can’t call yourself 305 if you weren’t strapped to a palm tree in South Pointe Park, naked, screaming the lyrics to “Culo” for the hurricane!
No. We are all “305.” We are all just trying to make the best decision we can for ourselves and our families. And more importantly—this time—we are all lucky. Rather than finding petty excuses to shame each other, we should, instead, come together and be thankful that we were spared a truly awful disaster. And we should realize that the chances of that truly awful disaster coming to fruition grow more likely with each passing year. When that time comes, will we be arguing over who stayed and who left? I hope not. I hope we will be helping each other stay safe and recover, like good Miamians should.
In the weeks it will take our city to return to normalcy, I also hope we can go back to judging each other’s Miami credentials based on the usual metrics: how much pork and caffeine we can consume before we explode.
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