I received a seething email from a man in Baltimore, Maryland. He apparently has a political bone to pick with the state of Florida, and he read that Florida is where I’m from.

He wrote: “…Florida is a stupid state, the most [deleted] up state in this country… I don’t think [Floridian] idiots deserve to be a state at all in my opinion.”

Well, I normally wouldn’t respond to a message like this, but I detected a slightly negative tone in the above email.

Granted, we Floridians have our problems. We are a unique state. And by “unique,” I mean that we are completely insane. But insanity is not the same as being “stupid.” Stupid people are uneducated, oftin using terible grammer.

But you know what? We Floridians are also polite, at least in West Florida. In fact, we don’t even use the word “stupid.” It’s offensive. If we’re going to call someone stupid, we usually say, “Well bless your heart.”

What irks me as a Floridian is whenever people from Baltimore stereotype me. Often, people assume that all Floridians speak Spanish and wear shorts year round. Which is ridiculous, sometimes we wear thong underwear.

I am proud of my homeland. Whenever I travel throughout the U.S., I find myself homesick for the nostalgic pastimes of the Florida of my youth. Such as, for example, head-on collisions.

Florida motorists are responsible for 79 percent of the auto accidents in the U.S., and we work hard to maintain that number. Florida is the only state where you can witness vehicles traveling both directions in the right lane, many of which are state employees.

I have totaled three cars in Florida. Each time, the cause of accident was that the driver ahead of me was a motorist who did not use a blinker and was also, technically, my immediate family member.

Something else I love about the Twenty-Seventh State is our wildlife. We are bustling with natural beauty such as bald cypresses, panthers, and Lyme’s disease.

If you are a Floridian and you haven’t picked at least one tick from your hind cheeks, are you even trying?

Also, scorpions. Scorpions are a big part of being a Floridian. I remember one time, when I was a kid, I was getting dressed for church and as I slid on my khakis, I felt something sting me on the inner thigh, very close to my Biblical regions. I tore off my pants to find a scorpion crawling around the crotch of my Dockers.

Within two minutes, my private parts swelled to the size of a televangelist. My mother took me to the hospital, the doctor looked at my inflammation and said—this is an actual quote:

“$#%*+.”

This is exactly the kind of professional medical care you’d expect to get, growing up in Walton County.

Walton County is like a lot of other Florida counties whose demographics are classified as “economically stratified.” Which means that our counties contain both Dollar Generals AND Whole Foods Markets®.

By and large, my county is a place with down home folks. We have more mobile homes per capita than we have actual capita. Sometimes devastating hurricanes tear through our towns and cause hundreds of dollars’ worth of damage.

My Panhandle home is located at the tippy top of the state. Some folks call us West Florida. Others call us L.A., “Lower Alabama,” since we are within leaping distance of Alabama.

Panhandle people are decent, solid people, even though we get a bad rap.

Sadly, the national media portrays us as total hillbillies, which isn’t fair since, for starters, the national media only visits us during hurricane season, whereupon their only journalistic objective is to interview local residents with the fewest teeth.

Oh, sure, I’ll admit, we’re rural people. Yes, our state actually has a festival called “Goat Day.” Yes, many of us only have one set of grandparents.

But did you know that we in the Panhandle also lead the nation in smokeless tobacco sales?

Also, Florida contains the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States, Pensacola. A city which was established only six years before Florida’s SECOND oldest American city, Disney World.

Oh, but we are a great state. We love our heritage. We invented Gatorade. We invented air conditioning. We invented NASCAR. We invented Bobby Bowden.

And to any Marylander rude enough to assert that our state is stupid, well…

I say bless his corazón.