Seniors Behaving Badly
The not-so-friendly side of “Florida’s Friendliest” retirement community.
Since I’m over 55 I’ve recently begun researching 55+ retirement communities. In the process one place kept popping up. It’s in Florida and it’s called “The Villages”.
The Villages, contrary to what the quaint name suggests, is a sprawling 33,000-acre city with 150,000 residents. It’s also growing like crazy each year. In the past decade, it grew 39% making it the fastest-growing metro area in the US during that 10-year period.
Besides the huge number of retirees moving south, another contributing factor for their incredible growth is their marketing. Look at any of their marketing materials and you’ll see happy seniors partying like it was 1969. But, there’s one thing you won’t see in their marketing materials — the large number of Villagers who fly and proudly wave their Trump flag.
Ryan Erisman is a writer who has covered The Villages for over a decade. In his 2021 guidebook for The Villages entitled, “Inside the Bubble”, his chapter on “Politics” reveals that about 70% of the residents are Republican. He further reveals that “The Morse family (the developers) are big-time Republican Party contributors” who’s “…probably given more money to Republican Party candidates than you and I will see in a lifetime.” Erisman goes on to say how “Pro-Trump golf cart parades were common in the run-up to the 2016 and 2020 elections, and The Villages gave $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee after his 2016 win.”
When he mentioned that “Some confrontations between Trump and Biden supporters made national news and have continued well after the election” I decided I had to investigate further.
According to a New York Magazine article, (“The #Resistance and the Retirement Community.” September 2020) “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown” is not always so friendly, especially for anyone not on the Trump Train.
Ed McGinty, a septuagenarian Democrat, shares what happened when he donned a WARREN ball cap shortly after Trump’s victory. “I’m walking the dogs one morning and my neighbor tells me if I continue wearing that kind of apparel, I’d better keep up my health insurance,” he recalls. The article goes on to say, “Every aspect of life in the Villages is lorded over by a developer who utilizes his considerable power to enforce order, traditional values, and a stridently Republican worldview. And in the age of Trump, residents feel emboldened to fly Confederate flags on their carts, cars, and homes and to plant little white crosses in their lawns that, neighbors say, “announce that this place is Christian and this place is white.”
In September 2020, a Democrat resident named Shirley Schantz published an op-ed on a local alternative news blog under the title “Reasons I Am Afraid to Live in the Villages.” In it, she detailed the disturbing behavior she has witnessed: “Beer poured on the seat of a cart. A flag tore off a flagpole. A flagpole was taken off a house and broken. Cars keyed.” “My letter was a call for civility,” says Schantz.
Of course, bad behavior can go both ways and the article points out a number of cases where Democrat residents behaved poorly, too. During a Republican Golf Cart parade anti-Trump, hecklers can be seen on video getting in the faces of Trump supporters yelling, “FUUUCK TRUUUMP!” One can also be seen yelling, “Where’s your white hood?!” The reply to that was a pumped fist and an enthusiastic, “That’s right! White power! White power!” A Villages reporter caught the scene on video. The video then hit the Internet and got re-tweeted by Trump. It then made national news.
H. Gary Morse, the mysterious billionaire developer who created the community and the Villages holding company, was one of the nation’s top Republican donors. The Morse family has controlled everything in the community: the hotels, the newspaper, the radio station, the banks, the hospitals, the mortgage and insurance companies, the real-estate corporation, golf-cart dealerships, trash-collection companies, and construction companies. They are landlords to dozens of restaurants and retailers spread over hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail space. As a result, “Fox News is piped into the town squares and stores” says Chris Stanley, president of the Villages Democrats club. “Every 20 minutes, you’re getting Fox News updates.”
The two Democrat residents that I’ve just spoken with say things have calmed down since the election. They also claim there's an unwritten rule to avoid political conversation. But, that hasn't stopped some Trump supporters from wearing their “Let's go Brandon” T-shirts.
Lyn McKenzie, a staunch Democrat who has seen her share of confrontations, is making sure she’s prepared for the worst, “Every day I make sure I put on good panties … just in case something happens and I get killed. I don’t want the cops cringing at any gross granny panties.”
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John Follis is an award-winning writer whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, TIME, and “Mirror on America” a pop-culture anthology that includes essays from Stephen King and Dick Clark. As a copywriter, he’s the recipient of over two dozen awards. His Medium series, “Just Sayin’” comments on everything from Identity Culture to Football. https://linktr.ee/johnfollis
