Written in a hotel room
Somewhere on the Port St. Lucie/Stuart, Florida line
Monday - April 1, 2013
I've just had a family reunion with all my siblings in Fort Pierce/Port Saint Lucie. Although I was wiped out by the long drive (5 hours from the Keys - after having gotten off my job at 4:00 AM), I took a 3 hour nap and we all met for a kitchen table discussion starting at 8:30 at night which went on at a leisurely pace and finished up 3 hours later.
Most of our talk centered on our aging mother, the Macro-Economy, and what the four of us are doing in our lives for work, etc.
I was very interested in the differences between the Port St. Lucie/Fort Pierce area vs. the Florida Keys. One of the “draws” (if you will) of this area is the adequate supply of inventory of homes for sale, all at what seems like rock bottom prices to us Keys’ residents: I saw homes, vacant and occupied, for sale up here for 1/5th to 1/10th of what they would listed for in Key West proper.
Despite this huge advantage in home prices, there are many compromising factors which would give most Keys’ residents pause in selling their homes or quitting their jobs and moving up here: chief of the quality of life issues would be the big tradeoff of massive Congestion/Traffic.
At 6:00 AM, I turned on the hotel room TV and flipped through the channels. All three major networks hosted by hometown "happy news teams" pretty much reported the same thing: the lead criminal stories from overnight, the one or two puff pieces about the local crafts fair or collector car auction, and every 10 minutes: traffic reports.
At the very moment the Morning Zoo teams were signing on radio and TV, there were already traffic backups on major arteries feeding I-95 and the Florida Turnpike. Looking at the "skycams" from hovering copters, one can see miles of headlights snaking in one direction while in the opposite direction you see miles of ruby red tail lights, some moving at snail pace, some stopped dead in the off ramp/on ramp lanes. At 6 AM in Key West or the Keys, only the charter boat captains, shrimpers, waste removal teams and bar cleaners are up and about.
All morning, the three major networks continued to pump travelers' advisories: Between this road and that road, the travel time is 24 minutes. Between this avenue and that avenue, the travel time is 39 minutes.
You look out the hotel window and see traffic backed up at the traffic light heading into Stuart, Florida. Where are these people going so early in the morning, foot tapping brakes, gas, brakes, gas, while radio jocks using sound effects and forced laughter are background noise to assuage the stress and loneliness of a long distance commute?
I looked at this madness and wondered how anyone could be lulled into believing that "this is living".
You've got these roomy, inexpensive, houses in quite subdivisions, but there is no meeting place for neighbors to greet neighbors. There is no corner store like you have in Key West run by some local you've known for years and where locals you’ve known for years sit and chat politics, sports or local news.
The morning routine up here for commuters seems to be this: you have to get into your car, drive through the maze of your housing development, and find the main road taking you down to, say, a nearby convenience store or all night drugstore 1 1/2 miles away on the corner as your one stop shop for salty snacks, beer, sodas and other processed foods by giant corporations which have packaged these short term palliatives in packaging which belie the empty nutrition inside. The closest open business to my brother’s home at this hour of 6 AM when he’s just hitting the road for his drive to work two counties away is a CVS drugstore. The clerks all know him by name. But his local CVS has no chairs, no benches, no place to sit - inside our out - so one can slowly warm up and prepare for the day or to wind down from a long night at work. That plus CVS isn’t in the business of serving fresh coffee, bagels, croissants or pastries.
Places which allow socializing are not in abundance at this time of hour as they are in Key West. Here , you’d be forced to visit a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts which only has indoor plastic seating, all matched to the corporate logo’s colors. The homogenized feel of a Dunkin’s Donuts interior does not exude a warmth which attracts a knot of locals who want to sit and shoot the breeze for 30 minutes or more. The feel of the place is “eat and run”, and when I say “eat” it usually means, eating quickly in large bites so that you can hurry up and get on the road with that monster size cup of coffee which you will end up walking into your place of employment.
Or, maybe you feel the extended drive to a place which has faster service is what you desire: you can motor down a few more miles to the nearest McDondalds and eat your Happy Meal inside their newly remodeled store, or order your food through the bustling drive-through and eat while you drive - which is what most commuters do in Port St. Lucie/Fort Pierce at this time of day.
I asked my brothers about his neighbors. Here, you don't know your next door neighbors, you know of them. You might say hi when the kid's soccer ball goes over the fence. You don't have neighborhood parties. The old people frown on children playing in the streets. And from what I see, not many kids live in these quiet sub-divisions. The lack of laughter is quite noticeable. Dogs must be leashed. The houses, all bunched up together with manicured lawns and cars in the drive, speak of Suburbia in a hush. The kids are entombed in their rooms with the latest video game or texting one another on their shiny smartphones. The only way the working parent might see them is on their way out the door, digging into a bowl of Frosted Flakes, Cap’n Crunch or Lucky Charms, or maybe on their arrival home when Dad don's the "World's Greatest Chef" apron to cook some processed meat tubes on the gas grill outside, or on a Sunday as he sinks into a couch and cheers on the Dolphins.
The suburbs up here - and their further out extensions of the exburbs - have no soul, no funk, no real feel like my beloved, but fast disappearing, Key West. I'm not talking about the Key West of North Roosevelt, Blvd with its two miles of strip malls. I'm talking the little shops and stores and bars and businesses established by locals who depend on us all to keep their - and our - uniqueness alive.
Up here on the South Florida mainland, usually a successful "local" owned store is basically a "franchise".
You buy into the corporate dream of it has to be done "this way" and you’ll make a six figure income. The tradeoff of a franchise with attendant garish signage (usually backlit plastic which makes stargazing impossible for miles around) is this: the more stores open, the more removed the founder of a chain is from giving part of his connectivity to the community. The personal touch diminishes with every store opened under the brand. Like looking through an old time navigator's three sleeved telescope through the wide end lens and slowly moving the eyepiece away from your body, the owner’s imprinted image gets smaller and smaller the more stores he/she opens. The more stores opened, the "colder" the business becomes, the harder and more black/white the “systems” employed become. You as a franchisee might “own” one of these so called mainland “locally owned businesses”, but in the end, the franchisee has no say in how to operate his business with a more personal feel. When you buy into a franchise, you know who owns you and tells you what uniforms must be worn and at what temperature the coffee must be brewed, using the corporate bean, all poured into a styrofoam cup with the corporate logo on the outside.
You buy into the corporate dream of it has to be done "this way" and you’ll make a six figure income. The tradeoff of a franchise with attendant garish signage (usually backlit plastic which makes stargazing impossible for miles around) is this: the more stores open, the more removed the founder of a chain is from giving part of his connectivity to the community. The personal touch diminishes with every store opened under the brand. Like looking through an old time navigator's three sleeved telescope through the wide end lens and slowly moving the eyepiece away from your body, the owner’s imprinted image gets smaller and smaller the more stores he/she opens. The more stores opened, the "colder" the business becomes, the harder and more black/white the “systems” employed become. You as a franchisee might “own” one of these so called mainland “locally owned businesses”, but in the end, the franchisee has no say in how to operate his business with a more personal feel. When you buy into a franchise, you know who owns you and tells you what uniforms must be worn and at what temperature the coffee must be brewed, using the corporate bean, all poured into a styrofoam cup with the corporate logo on the outside.
The more removed from the “personal” touch one becomes by owning or relying on businesses which are franchised or owned outright by a megalithic entity such as CVS, Walmart, Dunkin’ Donuts, Walgreens, McDonald’s, etc., the more one feels like a number, like just another brick in the wall.
Up here, the United Corporations of America are on grand display. For miles, the eyes are visually assaulted and fatigued by endless logos of giant brand stores which have removed the "neighborly" feel of mom and pop operations. At yet, looking at the traffic patterns of mainland Florida, one realizes these giant corporate chains which have strode across our country and put the local mom and pops out of business will be the next “going out of business” victims during the coming crisis of a world with Peak Energy.
Peak energy means peak growth is coming. All of this growth at any means - predicated on cheap and easy to find energy sources (coal and oil) is coming to a slow, inexorable end. Perpetual growth cannot be. The planet is not going to hear it. Pollution is taking its toll. Mother Earth is telling us the raping and pillaging of her and her fauna and flora has upset the balance of the natural world and now karma is coming to kick us all in the ass with a size 14 steel toed Doc Martin boot.
The days of Cheap Oil are gone. And so are the days of Happy Motoring.
Just look at the traffic up here: where are all the happy motorists one used to see in the 50s and 60s Esso ads, dad with pipe hanging out of his mouth, wearing a fedora? Mom in the front seat of the sedan, sporty hat on, a strand of pearls at the neckline, two well scrubbed faces of the kids bunched up a the backseat windows marveling at the countryside passing by? When the interestates were built, no one wore seatbelts. No one had a GPS monitor stuck to the front windshield. No one had TVs embedded in the dash or flip down sunshades or the backs of seats to sedate the kids who are now belted in with seatbelts and harness straps as though they are riding inside a cargo plane into a war zone. But then again, today, there's not much countryside to see in a one or two hour commute to work.
As a nation, we don't stop and think when filling up the tank that the stored sunlight energy represented by a gallon of gasoline is a very slow chemical reaction which took hundreds of millions of years for Mother Earth to prepare for humankinds' unbridled use as the basis, the very fuel, for the Modern Economy of the past 150 years.
We have squandered that precious fuel by building a gluttounous America with no soul. We have turned our backs on mass transit (during the last Century, GM and Big Oil would go into small towns and buy up the short transit systems, rip up the track or pave over them so as to sell more cars, more oil) and we have a country built on the idea that Cheap Oil is an inherent right, and that growth - and cheap energy - are perpetual. When we went to war in Iraq, our Vice President, Dick Cheney - once the head of Halliburton,Inc. which was also one of biggest recipients of the Military Industrical Complex contracts in that country - said, "The American way of life is non-negotiable." Talk about playing to the base wants of the American consumer!
President Eisenhower tried to warn us about what would become of the “American Way of Life” as he left office. In his farewell address he told raised the alarm about corporate policy dictating our foreign policy. He gave us the phrase "the Military Industrial Complex" in his farewell speech of 1961 in the Rose Garden. The irony is Eisenhower built the nation's infrastructure of super-highways. But it was only when it was time for Ike to walk off the Big Show stage that he understood - and admitted - he was part a machine which depends on a constant and cheap energy source. Ike knew future wars would be fought for oil and that these wars would enrich sociopathic men whose children would not fight in those wars.
If Ike were alive today, he'd be shocked at how small town America has been shellacked by Growth At Any Cost mega-corporations who buy in bulk and undersell the mom and pop businesses by selling junk (be it food or products) at the lowest costs. He'd be dismayed at how Main Street has been co-opted by Wall Street and Madison Avenue, how the corporatocracy depends on us all being "Good Little Consumers" who buy into the meme of the moment, "There's never been a better time to buy a home", "More Taste - Less Filling," "A diamond is forever," "Breakfast of Champions", "Good to the last drop," and so on and so forth."
It's no accident that when President Bush stood on a mound of 9/11 rubble and urged our country to unite at the task at hand, he told Americans the best thing they could do is to go shopping to show them terrorists you can not stop America.
I submit that most of America does not critically think, that its people - once citizens - are now sedated, mindless consumers.
When I looked out my hotel window this past Monday morning I saw a lifestyle which is foreign to me. What I saw is what Throeau meant when he said, “Most people live lives of quiet desperation.” I could not imagine anyone winning a lottery in Fort Pierce and wanting to live is such a Wasteland of subdivisions, endless franchises in stripmall fashion, and traffic which boggles the mind (and which is still not as bad as Miami/Dade traffic).
This Monday morning, I missed the Florida Keys badly. When I saw the traffic at 6 AM (we were planning on leaving the hotel between 7 and 9AM) I shook the little woman awake and said, “We’re not going anywhere in this traffic. Stay in bed. Well sleep through this day. I’ll get you up between 8PM and 12 midnight, and then we’ll drive home.”
Which is what we did. And the traffic at 9PM leaving Fort Pierce/Port St. Lucy was about 1/50th of what it was during “peak hours”. And the traffic on the turnpike going South was so sparse, there were moments where we’d see no headlights in our rear view mirror. Lesson learned: always travel South Florida between 8 PM and 5 AM to escape the madness most dayshift South Floridians put up with every day of their working lives.
We were only up there on the mainland for 30 hours, but being in the vortex of everybody going somewhere at the fastest pace in a mindless rat race sucked the life spirit out of me. It reminded me of the opening lines of one of my favorite Jackson Browne songs of all time, "Bright Baby Blues":
I'm sitting down by the highway
Down by that highway side
Everybody's going somewhere
Riding just as fast as they can ride
I guess they've got a lot to do
Before they can rest assured
Their lives are justified
Pray to God for me baby
He can let me slide
I’m an Atheist and don’t pray to any gods, but I concur with the lyrics Jackson Browne put down years ago.
I don’t intend on joining the rat race in my waning years, unless it is to commute from a family farm in the middle of nowhere to go work in a burb or city with no soul. I don’t want to come home to a place which has no “there” there.
