Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Sabotaging ourselves at times...



All the hullabaloo about the water releases into the Caloosehatchee River from Lake Okeechobee forty plus miles south from our home is causing the water to turn brown and harming the estuaries as well as the tourist business! (The reasoning is so those 35, 000 homes and people there would not get flooded from Lake O’s overflow, which is way beyond what its capacity has been due to all this rain…Sure the Army Corps of Engineers should step in and build another dike to shore up the waters, but the funding fell down on the job… oh yeah, it was a go, but as you would have it the federal government has not done what they should about the situation. Where have I heard this before?)

An alligator was even seen in the Gulf of Mexico near the shoreline at the beach in Fort Myers, ordinarily unheard of!
You see, they are mostly fresh water not salt water reptiles, although, we have had a few down our saltwater canal here in Port Charlotte, but not recently, without any merging of fresh and salt water here.

Our Governor Scott came down to the area to tell the people south of us that he is authorizing 90 million bucks to make a two and half mile bridge over towards the center southern part of the state, and that will have the future waters, re-directed, going out to the Everglades where the water will be filtered naturally and our southwest friends will not have the brown muddy scary waters harming their local waters or tourist industry!
Hip, hip, hooray!
But sadly, the hitch is, it will take three years to build this project… oh well… isn’t that always the way?
Bureaucracy at its finest!

Meanwhile due to all the publicity locally and probably nationally that we, Florida, appears to get negatively, our number one industry, tourist, is taking another nasty hit!
Why couldn’t we keep this one little dirty secret to ourselves, hmm?
I think sometimes that is why we have all these issues, telling people what’s going on down here.
So many other states practice the state of mum-ness or hush, hush-ness!
Even when the tourists arrive the news covers their expressions of distaste.
One even thought that we had another oil spill!

DEAR PEOPLE, LISTEN UP! THAT OIL SPILL OF 2010, NEVER CAME DOWN THIS FAR, BUT THE MEDIA FORGOT TO CLARIFY THAT AND PEOPLE ASSUMED THAT IT HAD AND AGAIN THE TOURISTS STAYED AWAY!

Our Gulf coast has taken many hits in these last few years other than natural disasters, and that is why I truly believe when that woman said that the water looked as if it was another oil spill someone should have said right away, no it was a chocolate spill and we know how much you love chocolate! Now, who doesn’t, really!?
She would have spread the word and the tourist industry would have been back on track…problem solved.

Crazy as it sounds; the water is perfectly safe to swim in and has been tested. Sure there are algae blooms down canals, south of here, not here, but the rain and the heat can cause them too, why we have even had them in our back yard freshwater fish pond and our fish are fine! The usual cause is runoff from fertilizers and such…sounds bad, but here we are not allowed to use high nitrogen fertilizers during rainy season, June 1st- thru- November 30th, every year, you would think they too had the same rules, if you live on the water you must respect the law! See not so terrible, really!?

Moving on…
Port Charlotte Florida’s homes have gone up in value by 40% for some reason!
More so than any other county in our state!
And the sales of homes here have gone up too!
Due to no more overstocked items, the glut has diminished and demand has gone way up for the lower quantities of choices...

The only thing is… when the value goes up, so must the taxes…Ben Franklin's quote "but in the world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” How prophetic of the man.  

Finally…
Today is a very important day, it was fifty years ago today that a great human being gave our country the hope to make significant changes in how we get along with one another, all people, the honorable Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with his historic, I have a dream speech and here it is: http://www.archives.gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf
It is six pages long, but worth the read… I was thirteen when he originally spoke those words and probably not as interested as I should have been, but over the years you grow and you learn and greatness has a way of shinning through when truth, along with understanding prevails.
Maturity resounds when one takes the knowing of others trials and tribulations can make us all stand up and take notice… I think that two years later is when I did finally did get it when my parents and I went on the two month trek to see our fine country and every major city we stayed in or passed through had race riots going on after we had left…talk about getting that light bulb to go off I do believe that in 1965 was when I finally started to get why this hatred of people had to stop the emotion in me became volatile too, but in a positive way… and of course when our sons were small and watched Sesame Street and they too back in the 1970’s talked about how people were like flowers all of us in different colors and shapes and sizes and we're all beautiful in our own way!

On that note of my feelings of this day and other none of my business nosiness sticking it, where it don’t belong, allow me to be the very first to wish all of you a very happy good night and ask you to kindly count all your blessings and share those overages with you know who and we will too!

And next time please be here or be square, ya hear!

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