Troxler's last column for St. Pete Times: "There is no other Florida in the world"

madfloridian

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Sat Jun-11-11 12:32 PM
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Troxler's last column for St. Pete Times: "There is no other Florida in the world"

He mentions that the phrase is familiar. It comes from Marjory Stoneman Douglas' book about the Everglades, River of Grass. Her words from 1947:

There are no other Everglades in the world.
They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. They are unique also in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass.

I doubt she would know the Everglades of today.

Troxler speaks in a different context....about what is happening to our state today.

Fixing Florida will be fun to watch...as a fan.

No other Florida in the world. No place nearly like it. Not where you can toast the flash of sunset at Mallory Square, and gawk at the castles along Palm Beach, and feel unstylish on South Beach, and see where Mickey Mouse lives, and visit the Oldest This-and-That in the New World, and follow Ponce de Leon's quest for the Fountain of Youth, and swim in crystal spring waters with manatees, and stand where humanity first reached to the stars.

Oh, yeah: And wear shorts in winter, and fall in love during an endless spring, and try to catch a fish now and then, and ski, and swim. And cut the engine and the light in the boat so there is nothing but stillness and thick dark air, and mosquitoes and stars, and the glint of eyes looking back at you from the swamp all around.

He mentions how a book by Gary Mormino, a history professor at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, describes the "megastate Florida, the crushingly developed Florida."

He mentions long-term thinking about the state.

We should make sure Florida has the water it needs, and the roads it needs, and the schools it needs. The business of our state should be something besides unrestricted, anything-goes growth. Those people making money off Florida should help pay for the costs of their growth.

But then he points out that we have chosen a "generation of leaders of Florida who do not believe in these values."

I do not think most Floridians fully realize, and will not for some time, the full damage of what has already happened in Tallahassee. Our state's governor and the majority of our state's Legislature believe in exactly one thing: making money off Florida. They have repealed many of the laws that Florida passed trying to make itself a better state. We have, quite literally, propelled this state back into the 1950s, and when the economy explodes again, look out.

He mentions he feels optimistic because more are aware of what is happening. I would like to feel that way also, but where I live anything bad that happens they blame on the Democrats and liberals.

My own thoughts are that is heartbreaking to see this state dying like this for the sake of idiotic ideology.

A good-by to Howard Troxler, one of the best.