This morning, a member of Key West member of “The Resistance” amigo responded to the recent What about Mother Nature's constitutional rights in the Florida Keys? post at this blog:
Outstanding column (again), Mr Bashinsky,
Esq. I was going to ask you to take me off of your mailing list as I am
not conversant with the angelic focus of most of your recent
postings.
But then I read this one.
You are a living history of our sad anti-development,
our devolution into the inhuman future that is the fate of (hu)mankind and
everything we pollutingly touch.
Keep me on your list. We miss you.
Glad you are home with your re-united family, but know that you are always
welcome to return.
Rick Boettger
I replied:
Thanks, Rick -
Can't say I recall anyone in the Florida Keys,
not even religious people, ever liked what I blogged about God, angels, the
devil, etc. Yet, it was angels that sent me to the Florida Keys in 2000, to get
involved in politics there, according to a dream I had on a Greyhound bus
passing through Tallahassee en route to Key West. It was angels that then kept
sending me back to the Florida Keys after taking me elsewhere for a while.
Until, angels told me to leave Key West in late fall 2018, and try Alabama again.
My blog topics now, and since before you and I
met in Key West, depend on what does on in my life and dreams. I thought on
waking this morning that today might bring another Mother Nature post, it being
Mother's Day. But I didn't see anything tangible nudging me. I went online,
Google-searched and found links to pretty interesting Mother nature likes
coronavirus articles, such as:
But I didn't feel arrived a "the meat of
the coconut".
I was about to take a nap and see if a dream
would clarify, when I saw your email. I recalled Kari told me last night that
she heard on the radio news down there that the ocean was clear and corals were
recovering and Key West was talking about cutting down to one cruise ship a
day. I google-searched and found this article with a video about Miami
waters clearing up. It’s a good article and video.
I recalled the Key West Chamber of Commerce
spokesperson, a local physician, saying at a channel-widening forum a few years
ago that the dirtiest worst possible cruise ships were calling on Key West, and
the way to resolve that was to widen the channel so much bigger more modern
cruise ships could get into Key West. Arial photos of cruise ships tearing up
the sea bottom as they leave Key West pictures better than a thousand words.
A young lady lawyer, who touted herself as an
environmentalist, also spoke for the Chamber of the Commerce during the
channel-widening debate. She consistently said the pubic referendum was not
about widening the channel and cruise ships, but was about studying widening
the channel and jobs. Her boyfriend, who hosted one of the public forums and
later became her husband, had written this book, published in September 2016,
in time for the November presidential election.
Did I smell sulfur? You fucking better believe!
The Key West Dock Master was selling cruise
ships city water pulled out of the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority's south
Florida aquifer and the Aqueduct Authority’s south Florida desalination plant,
and pumped through the overseas waterline down to Key West.
I told Kari that Key West should stop receiving
cruise ships altogether. Don't sell them city water, don't provide docking
services and tug boat assistance. Don't provide cruise ship passengers
conch trains rides in from the Outer Mole Pier. That will put an end to loud
nuisance conch trains and trolleys touring city neighborhoods and dirty t-shirt
and scam cosmetic shops on lower Duval Street. The local sea creatures and
vegetation will sing hallelujah praises of thanks! Mother Nature not be
quite as distressed. Maybe she will not call in a Category 5 hurricane.
In 2014, Mayor Craig Cates calmly told listeners
during a Pirate Radio mayor candidate debate that I was wrong, there was no
MRSA flesh-eating-bacteria in Key West waters, the ocean was clean and
beautiful. Every physician and professional diver in Key West and the Florida
Keys knew the ocean was full of MRSA. Cates won that and all five of his mayor
races without run-offs. What did that say about nature lovers in Key West? Now
Cates is a governor-appointed county commissioner. Mother Nature must be
thrilled.
I imagine sea creatures and vegetation have not
seen much in the way of jet skis in the Keys since the coronavirus
shutdown. I would make it a keel-hauling offense to operate a jet ski
anywhere but deep water.
I have a dear old flats guide friend in
Islamorada, with whom I and my young daughters fished when he had a rare open
date on his calendar. He told me lots of stories.
When he was younger, after fishing anglers 8
hours, he would either wade from the bank or take his skiff somewhere he liked
and fish himself. Fly fish. After work one day, he ran his skiff to an
ocean side flat just west of Bud n' Mary's. He was poling his skiff toward a
school of tailing bone fish, when a yahoo (not the great game fish) on a jet
ski came barreling across the flat throwing up a big rooster tail and spooked
the school. The yahoo barreled on. My friend poled his skiff into a hole in the
flat and jumped his skiff out of the hole with the Mercury outboard trimmed up
for shallow water running. The yahoo finally sensed something behind his sorry
ass, turned around and saw my friend's skiff about ten yards astern. The sorry
ass yahoo spun the jet ski out of control and fell off in about 2 feet of
water. My friend advised the wet sorry ass that the next time there would be no
polite trailing and warning.
My flats guide friend is who told me about posh
probably 95-percent-Anglo Republican Ocean Reef Club being fined $60,000 a day
by a federal judge for dumping its untreated sewage into saltwater creek there
on outgoing tides. When I mentioned that many years later to Captain Ed
Davidson at a school board candidate form, Ed chuckled, said he filed that
lawsuit in federal court against Ocean Reef Club.
My flats guide friend told me that commercial
fishermen not of Anglo-decent were going into the back country and finding
holes near mangrove islands and stringing nets around the holes and then
driving their boats up next to the mangroves and pouring bleach in the water,
which drove every fish, lobster, stone crab, etc. in the holes toward the nets,
which were closed and every living sea creature caught and hauled on board.
My flats guide friend was in the Sierra Club. I
think he was its president. I think he was president of the local flats guides
association for a while. He traveled sometimes to Tallahassee to testify before
the Florida Legislature about pollution in the back country and the Bay of
Florida. He told them about the beach. He told them about farm and golf course
and subdivision fertilizer going into the Everglades and the Bay of Florida,
and red tides, and other Mother Nature extinction events underway.
Maybe if my flats guide friend and Capt. Ed
Davidson, instead of me, had run for county commission 3 times, they would have
gotten elected and that would have made a difference for Mother Nature in the
Florida Keys? But then, maybe nothing short of a made-in-communist China
bio-weapon would make even a small difference in the Florida Keys and
everywhere else on this human-virus beleaguered planet. Maybe only a human
extinction event can give Mother Nature relief.
Meanwhile, I already hear jet skis and power boats
racing around Key West. I already see sea-killing monsters lined up to get into
Hawk’s Channel. I already see President Trump, Florida Keys Republicans and,
yes, Florida Keys Democrats cheering wildly, as if Jesus has come to save them.
Sloan
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