You people destroyed my home, so I hope that you people are destroyed.

I was very lucky to have grown up in a small town on the east coast of Florida in the 1970s. This was the last time that Florida would have any resemblance to the way that it had been since the beginning. Ocean, bays, rivers, creeks, marshes, swamps, and forests. Not condominiums, gated communities, Publix shopping centers, pavement, highways, and millions of transplanted people who know nothing, and care about nothing.

The forts, plantations, roads, and canals built by the explorers and colonists in the 1600s and 1700s did very little harm to the environment. Nor did the railroads and riverboats in the 1800s. Up until the 1950s, before the interstate highways, everyone who came and everything that was built, existed in agreement or acceptance of the surroundings, not destroy it.

In the 1970s in Florida, many small towns remained. Houses and buildings were constructed where the higher ground existed, and rivers, creeks, marshes, and swamps stayed as they were. Most structures were only one or two-stories in height, which caused there to be a canopy of oak trees covering most of the town and streets.

When I was very, very young, the people from elsewhere that had come to live in Florida were retirees. Mostly, these retirees required small simple affordable residences that fit on lots that had long been set aside for housing. And these people were for the most part content with the way things were: quiet, simple, plain, slow-paced, affordable, peaceful, quaint, picturesque.

Due to news spreading about how affordable, pleasant, and enjoyable living in Florida was, it became the number one retirement destination. However, as manufacturing began to decline in the northeastern U.S., especially in the automotive and steel industry, working-age people began moving to Florida as a way to start over.

Working-age people from the northeastern U.S., “Yankees” a.k.a. “assholes”, began moving to Florida with the intention of starting over, getting a good job, owning a nice home, having kids. But in Florida, there weren’t very many jobs, or good paying jobs, because Florida was slow-paced, not industrialized, not commercialized like the northeast U.S. Thus began some conflict with local people, and Yankees seemingly always complaining about how things were better back in New York, New Jersey, or Ohio.

Steadily, Yankees changed Florida to where it now resembles the areas that they fled from. High-rise concrete condominiums blocking out the sun on beaches. Noisy eight-lane highways everywhere like Great-Walls-Of-China. Shady oak hammocks replaced with concrete & asphalt shopping centers, strip malls, and tree-less subdivisions. Storm-water runoff polluting every river, creek, and bay.

The stupid fucking assholes that have moved to Florida in the past twenty years don’t even know or realize that they have destroyed it. It’s like a swarm of locusts, or infestation of rats, ruining everything, crawling on top of each other.

This is why I hope that Hurricane Ian destroys Florida. I am a fifth-generation Floridian who left Florida in 2001 because it had become so overcrowded and ruined. In 2008, my father and his wife who were in their 70s left the town where they had both grown up in Florida, because they could not stand how rude, nasty, and pushy the people had become with the tremendous population growth.

Yes, I want as many people, houses, buildings, and roads to be swept away, leaving behind nothing but sandy dunes.