Sunshine State Silliness

Folks who read my blogs about Florida foolishness may wonder why all the hate.  Why live in Florida; why not move?

I don't hate Florida.  Au contraire.  I have billions of reasons why I live here.  They're called "snowflakes."  I love the water; I love the warmth, and I especially love that I don't have to dress up like Nanook of the North, scrape ice off my windshield, and shovel a foot of snow off my driveway every time I want to go somewhere.

As for the foolishness, well, where else are you going to find such a variety of inanity, both tragic and comic?  For example:

* St Petersburg thinks it would be a super, neat-o, peachy-keen idea to replace all the streetlights with LEDs at a savings of $1.8 million per year.  Duke Energy, which supplies St Pete with electricity, says, "Now, y'all jus' go rat ahead and swap 'em out.  Jus' don't be lookin' for no $1.8 mil, though.  We do it for y'all, we gotta do it for every other cracker town in our area.  How's that gonna work for our bottom line?  Our folks gotta pay them golf club memberships, too, ya hear?"

* A Department of Environmental Protection lawyer successfully won a case against a couple who illegally filled in wetlands by an aquatic preserve.  Instead of celebrating, he started clearing out his office.

"As soon as the verdict came back, I had a sinking feeling," he said.  "I thought, 'When Jeff Littlejohn (DEP Deputy Secretary) hears about this, I'm probably going to lose my job.'"  Five months later, he and three other lawyers charged with enforcing DEP regulations were emptying their desks and hitting the bricks.

See, the thing is Florida's DEP is mainly for show, a sop to the state's tree-huggers and animal rights whackos.  Florida's legislature is practically a wholly-owned subsidiary of developers and big business.  If it had its way, the Everglades, for example, would at best be reemployed to carry away phosphates from the sugar industry and at worst be paved over to provide more land for upscale gated communities.  These enterprises generate revenues for campaign coffers, don'cha know.  Birds, gators, panthers, deer, bears and other such nuisance critters are just detriments, impediments, to progress.

* Tyndall AFB scrambled two fighters to intercept a Flight Express cargo plane on its way from Greensboro, NC, to Tampa.  Air traffic controllers had lost contact with the 28-year-old pilot "for significant periods during his flight."

"Hell, ah might have dozed off fer a spell, but that's whut autopilots are fer, duh!  All of uh sudden, ah look out muh window, an' thar's uh couple uh them fighter jets gettin' ready to lock on and send uh missile or two up muh ass!  Ah had tuh change muh drawers after tha', ah don' mind tellin' yuh!"

The pilot's blood alcohol level was more than three times the level at which the state presumes impairment.  He's looking at a max of 15 years in the slam.

* A two-year-old toddler crawled through a doggie door and made her way into her family's swimming pool.  She was found after several minutes and resuscitated, but remained unconscious as she was transferred to hospital.  Pinellas Park police were not expected to file criminal charges.

So, you might wonder, what's so "Florida" about that?  Since you asked, I'll tell you.  If that same little girl was found alone and unconscious in a locked car, the parents would have been handcuffed and doing the perp walk to the slam, where they'd have been charged with, at the least, criminal negligence and child endangerment.  What's worse, the girl probably would have been entered into the foster care system, which in Florida is tantamount to a death sentence.

The danger of living here is not the hurricanes, it's how easy it would be for one to OD on all of this insanity.  To do so would be to destroy whatever faith in humanity you may have left.  Me?  It's not surprising to me, anymore.  It's just confirmation.