There’s no more fitting tribute to Red Tape Florida’s recent piece — “The Red Tape Machine Doesn’t Get Its Start in City Hall. It Cranks Up in the Comments.” — than the actual Facebook comments reacting to it.
You can’t parody this stuff. In the very thread responding to a story about how grassroots outrage creates red tape, commenters lined up to — wait for it — fuel the very outrage machine that begets red tape. It’s a meta-loop of performative fury.
The story made a pretty simple point: bad public process doesn’t begin in a conference room at City Hall. It starts when political leaders are bombarded with contradictory, emotional demands from people who may or may not have even read the proposals they’re railing against. Leaders over-correct, stall, and then wrap a simple plan in a hundred-page binder to appease the masses. Thus: red tape.
And then the comment section delivered — with full-volume fury and not a whisper of irony:
• “This was done behind closed doors.”
• “They already paid off the commissioners.”
• “All the politicians are bought.”
• “Same sh*t, different day. The politicians are all corrupt.”
Let’s pause here: These comments were made under a post of the actual story that explains what happened — a story that exists for the very purpose of dragging sunlight into the process. And yet, folks still lined up to type angrily that “no one’s talking about this.”
And by the way, all those comments are maliciously false.
Irony doesn’t get much more pure than that.
Let’s be clear: frustration over development, traffic, tree loss, and neighborhood change is valid. But righteous anger loses its edge when it becomes a reflex rather than a reasoned contribution. And when that anger hits Facebook before it hits a planning meeting, what happens is exactly what this thread illustrates — the civic version of shouting at clouds.
A few of the comments get closer to a real conversation — one asks why all the homes are going up in Northeast Tallahassee while other parts of the city sit idle. Another makes a fair point about lot sizes and tree cover. But instead of thoughtful exchange, they’re buried under accusations of bribery, developer cartels, and some half-baked call for criminal prosecution.
Here’s the punchline: the very people who are most upset about local government dysfunction are often the ones unknowingly helping to cause it. When we argue from a position of ignorance, delay becomes the fallback. When we expect scandal, officials lawyer up. And when we insist that every pothole hides a conspiracy, we turn real planning into risk management theater.
So yes — Tallahassee may have a development problem. But it also has a comment section problem, which then becomes a “t-shirt brigade” problem at public meetings, before whom local leaders all too often cower.
And until we reckon with all that, the red tape machine will keep humming — powered not by bureaucracy, but by the very people shouting at it from their phones.