Long Boat Key is nestled along the Florida Gulf Coast, about 15 minutes from Sarasota. It’s typical of the new Florida, catering to tourists and retirees, a place to get away from winter’s harshness and drink mojitos while they shovel snow up North. The cheap mobile homes are quickly giving way to affluent condos. Construction is everywhere.
Further south, you can still see signs of the devastation wrought by the monster hurricane two seasons ago. The South Seas Plantation on Captiva is still closed, the posh resort turned into something resembling a lost civilization. The inequities of flood insurance and FEMA are still major topics around here.
Florida doesn’t seem worried about the growth spurt that reportedly has about 1,500 folks a day moving here from other parts of the country. Most of them are older folks that give the resort areas a bittersweet feeling—yes, we all grow old, but life can still be pretty good if you’ve been wise with your money.
Politics has magnified the importance of Florida. "Dangling chads" is now part of the nation’s lexicon. It seems you pretty much have to win Florida one way or another to become president. Florida has, in essence, given us George W. Bush, and—here’s a frightening thought—at some point down the road, it may put Jeb in the White House too. That’s if Republicans can walk the fine line between appealing to the hard line anti-Castro Cubans who have formed a power base in the southern part of the state. No Republican will ever kiss and make up with Castro, no matter how tempting the thought of opening up Havana to American business. The big chance the Democrats have in regaining the state at this point is if the Bushies start scaring the bejesus out of retirees again with talk of privatizing Social Security.
Current events have a way of getting blurred when you’re on vacation. When I first heard that Dick Cheney had shot someone, I thought, it might be premeditated. Well, he did tell Sen. Patrick Leahy to go "F" himself on the floor of the Senate, didn’t he?
Both Dick Cheney and John Chaney, the Temple basketball coach, have become similar personalities. Both have reached their senior years with an attitude that speaks of bowel irregularity and lots of heartburn. Both hate the media with an intensity most people reserve for malignant tumors. Both men could care less about the public and will utter intemperate remarks with the abandon of a young child. Both men may have once served their institutions honorably, but would be better off fading away into retirement before whatever is left of their reputations completely disappears.
Sometimes the news carries with it its own irony. News that the President is asking for lots more money again for Iraq (most of it to be spent on weaponry and such and not for reconstruction) was juxtaposed against news that our government was tossing some of the Katrina victims out of hotel rooms with a small stipend that guarantees they will be homeless once again. At the same time, it was announced hotel owners had made a killing off the government by jacking up their rates, while in Iraq billions of our tax dollars are unaccounted for because of shoddy bookkeeping and the venality of private contractors.
During most of our weeklong stay, a cold weather snap made it feel like Vermont in the fall rather than Florida. One rainy day, we ventured into one of those ubiquitous outdoor malls that have become a popular way for Americans to spend time when they are not watching "American Idol." It is noteworthy that Americans prefer watching reality television to the Winter Olympics. Since the fall of communism, it seems there are no bad guys for us to root against. Only the unlikely event of al-Qaeda fielding a hockey team can save NBC from ratings disaster. But we all know what happens when you mix terrorists and the Olympics, reference Munich.
While at the mall, we saw "Brokeback Mountain." The movie is excellent, but we all know its implications go beyond the "love story" of its advertising campaign. As hostile as the Bush Administration has been toward the rights of homosexuals, "Brokeback" shows the times they are a changin’ and as Bob Dylan wrote "you better get out of the way, if you can’t lend a hand." No matter what churches tell their followers Sunday morning, a lot of them are in the movie theaters on Saturday night enjoying a story that features a love affair between two gay cowboys. The mixture of people I saw in the theater could be seen in any bowling alley on Main Street.
What straight people identify with is that we all have compassion for the pain that comes with the human condition. We all have experienced or know people who have experienced love that was doomed from the start. For all their stubble amidst the countless sheep, these two cowboys could have been Romeo and Juliet. We will look back upon the acceptance of "Brokeback" by mainstream America as more important than any court ruling in the battle for gay rights.
It finally warmed up the last two days we were in Florida. It always does.
