Gratitude For Godzilla: A Mount Dora Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving comes to Mount Dora with somewhat cooler, fleetingly wetter days and moonier nights — enough, hopefully, of what passes for winter in Florida these days. It’s quiet in our Ninth Avenue neighborhood today, with several neighbors apparently out of town for the holiday and out-of-town owners staying home. Happy to have a full block, but it’s paradise to enjoy things so quiet.

But jitters are in the air. Worldwide events train fretful eyes toward the news as the Mideast continues to lure us into its curdle and Europe stays on lockdown. President Obama spoke yesterday to the country, saying Homeland Security had no specific or credible information regarding a plot on American soil. The Macy’s Day Parade in New York City will go on, but the police will be out in force.

Sometimes, that world makes our local one seem unreal. But fear carries equally through both. Both gun shops as liquor stores have sprouted up around Mount Dora. I’ve heard neighbors brag about their “AK’s” — assault rifles — while walking by, wondering who they were talking to and why a little town like this would require such dreadful armament.

Our world is so connected now, global, national and local are sometimes hard to tell apart. Especially when fear corrodes the threads. And our humane responses seem to suffer at every level. We seem just as angry about trees downtown as what Presidential candidates are saying or those damned Isis goons are launching next. Everywhere we miss the gentle and the joyous and the sustained.

But it may be that a failure to realistically account for the big world inside our little ones makes our defenses inadequate and damaging; we may be doing far worse things in our reaction to fear than the things directly causing fear.

The old alchemists believed that nothing could be properly joined that was not first fully separated, so before I write my Thanksgiving gratitude list, some things both far and near which make that list so essential these days.

I.

This summer we had three afternoons that topped 100 degrees, and it stayed hot through the fall. In early November, heat records broke across the state. Making things worse, tropic humidity hung over us like an oppressive wet blanket.

It’s the new normal, they tell us, and it does make you wonder how the seasons will continue to warp. The days of talking about whether global warming is happening are over. Now the task is one of adapting to those changes. Miami is furiously adding pumps and raising beachside roads. The Gulf Coast, which has seen 9 inches of sea level rise in the past 100 years, is losing its shoreline ecosystem. How can it be that in just a few years, this reality has come to trouble so our days?

Last Monday’s cool front brought temps into the ’40s. This may be as good as it gets, because

we’re in for a “Godzilla” El Nino starting in December — as big as the one in 1997–8, with seventeen years of more global warming to press the gas pedal to toward the metal.

Maybe it will be warmer, maybe cooler this winter (I’ve heard it both ways), but its sure to be wetter and stormier than normal.

I recall the tornadoes of ’98, it was a Sunday night in February when we went to be and then woke around 11:30 p.m. to the strangest sight of lightning flashes strobing every inch of the room. Its violence still forming, the storm passed over and we went to bed, finding out the next day that ten miles down the road in Sanford an F3 twister carved a 16-mile path of destruction, killing 13 and damaging some 625 structures. That night, twelve tornadoes in all tore across Central Florida, killing a total of 42 and injuring 280.

What is known as the tornado world’s Dixie Alley barrels through Lake County. Early-spring cold fronts over the past 25 years have caused tornadoes to touch down in Lady Lake, Mount Dora, Eustis, Paisley and Sanford that I can recall. We’re in the sights.

This time around, El Nino is aided by a hotter planet; one meteorologist said the effect will be Godzilla with the gas pedal to the metal. Bigger dude, badder affect. Are we ready? After the tornadoes of ’98, the state pushed for stiffer regulations for mobile homes which are most prone to uplifting winds. Building codes after the hurricanes of 2004 stiffened up.

But trees, well, they’re on their own. Mount Dora’s Storm of the Century in 1993 was an F3 tornado that ripped into town off Lake Dora, uprooting 500 trees and shearing another 1,500 in half. More than 50 power lines went down in the thrash, City Hall was inaccessible due to fallen trees, and just about all of the grand old oaks planted by city founders were toppled.

Six months before the Great Storm, the city had been planning to remove some aged laurel oaks from city parkways, fearing they would damage property and life. A number of citizens turned out to protest at Council, shouting, “Not one shall come down!”

Indeed. Had human hands done that work, perhaps the damage to the city wouldn’t have been so extensive. Our tree canopy has recovered long enough to worry about the ravages of similar storm. Political will to do anything about them right them is concentrated the composition of trees downtown right now. Eye off the ball, will we get slammed once again?

Whatever the case, this is as good as it gets; we should be thankful for each day thermometer and barometer leave us alone.

Yesterday freak rains fell throughout the day as breezes spread torn-looking clouds across the city. Showers now in the forecast for today — how do forecasts change so rapidly, are so unreliable these days — so we’ll take our peace as we can.

Is that Godzilla I see in the Macy’s Day Parade, rounding the corner, eyeing us aggressors with something less than gratitude?

2.

If you’re a refugee from Syria this week, your Thanksgiving dinner just got a whole lot further away — shrink that Norman Rockwell painting down to the size of postage stamp wayyyyyyyy at the back of a longer, darker, more difficult hall.

10,000 Syrian refugees hope to make it new homes in America. That compares to some 4 million Syrian refugees living now in city-sized camps in Turkey and Jordan, countries which have seen almost no terrorist activity in recent years. It takes some 18 to 24 months for a refugee to be approved for admission to the United States, and only 1,800 Syrian refugees have been admitted in the past two years. Of those who have been admitted, half are children and a quarter are adults over 60.

Refugee journeys already made perilous with winter seas are even more uncertain now.

Still, the wail to ensure that no terrorist enters this country hidden among the refugees has taken the already-toxic immigration debate and ramped it up close to hysteria. The bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last week would require he director of the F.B.I., the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the director of National Intelligence all to certify that each refugee applicant from Iraq or Syria poses no threat to the United States before being admitted. One hundred percent certainty means zero refugees.

(This sort of certainty is perversely akin to zero tolerance drug laws of the 1990s which sent millions of non-violent drug offenders behind bars for decades. The Grey Wastes are a carceral state for a generation of mostly black men — more than 2 million in prison now — who must exist without the promises and protections our government grants its other citizens. It is the Other Welfare, the net which keeps the privileged safe.)

Donald Trump has said he has no problem closing mosques and registering Muslims. He’s also been loudly cheered for outrageous lies about Muslims in New Jersey dancing on 9/11. Not to be outdone by the ruthless House, Ted Cruz has introduced a Senate bill called the Terrorist Refugee Infiltration Prevention Act, which would bar the U.S. from accepting refugees from any country “containing terrorist-controlled territory.” And Ben Carson has compared the mostly-Muslim Syrian refugees with “a rabid dog running around your neighborhood.”

Robert McCall of the Council on American-Islamic relations told Al Jazeera that’s Carson’s comment was reprehensible: “There is only one thing you do with a rabid dog — and that’s put it down.”

Charles Blow wrote in a Nov. 23 op-ed titled, “Anti-Muslim Is Anti-American,”

“Indeed, this is the problem with reckless, racist rhetoric: Each utterance tosses one more log onto the bonfire that can bourn out a space for the imaginable.” He then quotes Martin Luther King from his “The Other America” speech of 1967 when King declared, “Racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide,” and continued:

If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him; if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.

In Mount Dora of the 1950s, integration was the immigration of the day, the dreaded march of black schoolchildren into no longer all-white schools. It was fought with a hostility throughout the white South, reviled as the intervention of a communist-influenced Supreme Court.

Although Brown vs. the Board of Education was decided in 1954, Mount Dora schools would not integrate for another 12 years. “Separate but equal” was a cry never of much value in the black community where living conditions, wages, health, education and work prospects were kept dismally unequal. And it’s hard to say that much has happened to improve those prospects in Easttown since then. Black and white Mount Dora are as segregated as ever, and gated communities offer no olive branches for the common weal.

Gov. Rick Scott is playing the refugee card hard, joining with 25 other Republican governors in opposition to accepting Syrian refugees. He’s asked both House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell to refrain from using federal funds to handle the relocation.

All of this seems loud indeed when you consider that nothing’s happened over here in the latest round of ISIS nightmares. Imagine the measures taken by the terrified when a real bullet eventually is fired by a terrorist somewhere in the U.S.

In a civil war that his killed 220,000 since 2011 that has no end in sight, no attempt by the great powers to remediate and vanishing opportunities, 4 million refugees outside the country’s borders and a toxic reception by fearful Americans, what is this Thanksgiving supposed to mean? isn’t there anything we can do to reach a hand out and help? Invite a Syrian family to our thanksgiving dinner?

Maybe if we looked through the lens of humanitarianism rather than terrorism, we might see the frightened refugees with more welcoming eyes.

And maybe those of us who refuse to should go break bread in Homs, to understand the real meaning of fear.

3.

Mount Dora’s downtown commercial district is looking at its first continuous year of business after three years of infrastructure and streetscaping projects. Light Up Mount Dora kicks the shopping season off on Nov. 29, and for every night thereafter until Christmas, downtown will shine with some 2 million sparkling lights.

These sparkling nights have grown vastly popular in the past few years. Our street has jammed many times last year with the parked cars of Orlando folks desperate to get some of that real old-time small-town holiday fare.

Unfortunately, it looks like the new city council isn’t done with old business. Some citizens (including a few downtown businesses) don’t like the way that aging laurel oaks were removed and replaced with palms. Though the city has said it must move on — Fifth Avenue needs a facelift, and parking needs are dire — some of the new council members have promised force a costly and time-consuming re-visit of which trees go downtown. This could mean another delay of downtown business, tearing out palm trees and planting oaks that may not be appropriate for the intended spaces. The city had conducted 20 public meetings while the downtown construction process was underway, and it was only at the 21st meeting that the uproar of trees was engineered.

It’s understandable if city staff are miffed as to why there’s such strong emotion about this only now. Anger from some citizens who attended council meetings last year boiled over into rage. How did they get so tanked? And what is it that they really wanted?

That hostility I think is translatable to something else which has nothing to do about trees.

Governing isn’t the issue — it’s vengeance. Minds aren’t supposed to be changed; rather, heads are going to roll.

Turning back toward an expensive and time-consuming re-do seems more intent on getting egg on public face than providing any real economic or aesthetic sense. Beyond work on 5th Avenue and addressing the needs of parking, there’s also the issues of providing public transportation and turning toward much-needed lake front development.

And making a big deal over the net loss of four oak trees downtown belies the far greater vaster needs of the city’s urban forest. Clearly, it’s time of a plan that fosters diversity, beauty and safety — before the next Storm of the Century. City Manager Pastue budgeted $50,000 to start that work, but a short-sighted council may stubbornly keep going back to get what they want.

A council that fails to see the forest for a few green-ribboned trees has their eye off the ball.

Are we hitting that pause button again just before the Godzilla storms into town?

4.

For the past few years, Black Friday, the traditional post-Thanksgiving buck bacchanalia, has been starting earlier and earlier every year. Every vying for that first bankroll, more stores will be opening tonight, forcing employees to cut short their Thanksgivings.

But Amazon has already beat Black Friday by a week. This past Nov. 20, the digital retail colossus began offering “ten deals of the day,” starting off with cheap Kindles, TVs and game consoles. Every day until the “traditional” Black Friday, Amazon is offering ten new deals as well as “lightning deals,” with the greatest savings reserved for Thanksgiving Day. By the time the employee parking lots of their poor sagging brick-and-mortar retail competitors begin to fill, the waiting crowds will be noticeably thinner.

Amazon’s 20-year investment in building the ultimate online retail shopping machine is finally hitting its profit stride. Shares have doubled in value since the beginning of the year, making it one of the world’s 10 largest companies in stock value.

With the added cash cows of Amazon Web Services and Amazon Prime, and it’s hard not to see that this exceptional digital experience has become the “heart and lungs” of American online shopping. (It should be said however that Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce site, is dimensions larger than Amazon. But then so too China, whose shadow we now take for night.)

While some analysts say that patience was what allowed Amazon to grow and sprawl its way, actually it is the fundamental dynamic of digital disruption that built its ziggurat — by infinitesimals. By measuring the tiny differences of transactions from millions of users, platform giants like Facebook and Apple and Amazon can test improvements against the mass and create a difference that widens incrementally into dominance. No newspaper has the volume to test in such a way (and it’s unlikely that you’ll ever get those cats to herd), so its not surprising that platforms rule media now. (See Matthew Hindeman’s “Stickier News”)

Digital disruption has been devastating on a wide spectrum of industries, even governments (ISIS may be one of the first terrorist digital disruptors in its effectiveness in controlling media messages and recruiting endless bomb-vest volunteers). And while we know that disrupted workers now number in the tens of millions, disruption has not really been easier on its maniacally overworked employees, as the New York Times investigated in this controversial piece. (More recently, The Atlantic reported that teen suicides at hyper-competitive Silicon Valley-area high schools are three to four times the national rate.) Perhaps the only victor in digital disruption is the algorithm which forces it.

The digital divide in America is widening. According to a 2013 Pew Research Report, 54 percent of those making less than $30,000 had broadband access to the Internet, while 88 percent of those make $75,000 ore more did. A Common Sense Media this year reported that teenagers from low-income households unable to keep up with homework compared to middle-income and high-income homes with easy access to laptops.

But as I look at the scattershot attention on local, national and international events, with opinion so hotly divided and political paralysis almost matched in intensity by self-centered distractions, digital division may be the most corrosive influence of the Internet age. I wonder how a populace that has been splintered so widely between media choices, apps, channels, and platforms can have any collectively centered enough view to act with any accord. If I never venture onto Snapchat or Instagram, have I missed some enormous vantage on our country’s seething soul? Rendered thus so partial, am I truly becoming damagingly unique? What would a roomful of savage partials compose? Do the deficiencies add up to greater gap? Are we left with shards for awareness, the way a digital sound file only samples at intervals?

Digital derangement, that’s another brooding swarm. In 2013 the National Alliance on Mental Illness reported that one in four American adults suffer a mental illness in a given year. One in 17 suffer a serious mental illness like schizophrenia. Suicide is the third-leading cause of death among young people aged 15–24 year. Millions of veterans suffer from PTSD, a reality trauma which may have as much about what they saw over there as how the picture back here has become so skewed. Every day, about 22 veterans die from suicide.

Almost half of the homeless have serious mental problems, as does a quarter of the jail population. 18 percent of adults — some 42 million people — suffer from anxiety disorders, another 7 million live with depression, and some 9 million live with co-occurring mental health and addiction disorders. With children — our early digital adapters — suicidal tendencies are rapidly on the rise. And yet, less than half of all Americans suffering from mental conditions are receiving treatment. Some say that mental health apps will disrupt the treatment industry, but this may simply pour gas on the very thing that created the fire.

Maybe one platform will win all. The obvious choice is Facebook. Is there something worse that savage partiality? What about the digitally dominated mind as the Facebook functionality of tomorrow? Equipped with a gaze so ubiquitous and essential to our daily functioning that only a radical break in our digisphere — through a massive cyberattack, say — might either awaken us to reality or drive us mad encountering a world we forgot? (Ted Koppel has considered the possibilities of an all-out cyberattack, and what he sees is very disturbing.)

I think Alas Babylon, Pat Frank’s 1959 novel of a fictionalized Mount Dora following an all-out nuclear attack, could easily be a blueprint for how Mount Dora would exist in the wake of cyber warfare. Imagine survival in Mount Dora for months, even years, with no air conditioning.

Just when the state really begins to cook. And just when we can’t go without our digital devices for a second.

The realities of Alas Babylon itself may prove incomprehensibly difficult for the disrupted digital mind.

What will we do with that timeless sea of silent days and nights?

5.

It’s sure good to have those elections over! Even in an off-year, rancor ran high. Yard signs and political mailers paled before whatever was happening behind the scenes, and the surprisingly strong vote margins for the challengers says as much about those motivated to vote by reasons deeply personal to them as for great majority who didn’t bother to look up.

Do we also suffer a digitally disrupted politics? Certainly, the partisan divide in this country is about as wide now as the income gap. In a recent Pew survey, only 36% percent of Republicans feels that government has a major role in helping people get out of poverty (where 72% of Democrats do), and only 34% of Republicans see that it’s the government’s job to ensure access to health care (compared to 74% of Democrats).

Unlike the dominant success of digital-disrupting platform giants, its hard to see any winners in our politics. Both surveyed Democrats and Republicans say they can seldom if ever trust the federal government (89% Republicans, 72% Democrats), and Republicans’ distrust of President Obama is exceptionally keen (on 13% said they could trust his government, the lowest ranking of any administration by either party over the past 40 years.

If the success of Donald Trump with the hard Republican right is any indication (and Trump may be the digital disruption of the Republican Party), distrust of government is boiling over into a futile political rage. And sadly, it’s become way too evident here in Mount Dora. Is this a symptom of digital derangement? I wonder. Most of it does seem to have been strategically fanned by the Mount Dora News for their own purposes — as long as the city is punished and loses, that would be fine with them.

So far — only one meeting into the new councils rough mandate — cooperation, patience and discipline have been noticeably absent. Lauren Ritchie of the Lake Sentinel took them hard to task for blundering out of the gate with myriad procedural gaffs and a pointedly negative attitude. The Mount Dora News, never to be outdone in spinning events into self-serving news, blamed Council’s bizarre night on errors by city staff. So the waters remained chummed for the next council meeting. Let’s hope the city moves quickly forward on finding means to live-stream the meetings so everyone can see what’s happening with their own eyes.

Mount Dora City Manager in his Nov. 12, 2015 “SWOT” memo to the Mayor and City Council scratched his head about some of aspects this political tooth for blood, wondering if challenges in the city’s communications and customer service were “real or perceived.”

If you read his memo, he provides an outstanding summary of where the city stands and what it must now do. Shared priorities, he writes, essential and exceptionally lacking: “I do not get the sense that everyone agrees as to what are the community priorities. That needs to be addressed along with a realistic work plan to focus on accomplishing the identified priorities as consensus is achieved.”

Much of this was accomplished back in 2012 when City Council (including now-mayor Nick Girone) approved Envision Mount Dora, the city’s master planning document in which all other planning documents are integrated. Candidates Girone, Tillett and Slaby all voiced support of this plan, but now it seems the wrecking ball is out. If they manage to contravene the Envision Plan, that would effectively tear out the city’s future foundations.

The real work the city must now engage in is staggering — ten million dollars of utility infrastructure relocation, negotiations with county and state on the Wekiva Parkway extension, plans for the Innovation District. In his memo, Pastue points to other priorities as well, including an update of the economic construct, working relationships with other cities in the area, adding “bench depth” to its succession planning, better internal auditing, developing an information technology strategic plan and improving the expertise on the city’s historical and planning and zoning boards.

Big-ticket, eye-on the ball issues which our new council may have no gaze for. Not when they’re out for blood.

Conciliate, boys and girls. Scorched earths only serve the hateful.

6.

Okay, okay, onto my gratitude list. Recent research suggests than an attitude of gratitude is not just the optimum way to get through a Thanksgiving meal, but actually can help your heart stay healthy over the long run. According to Paul Mills, professor of family medicine and public health at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, gratitude fends off depression, stress and anxiety, which can all increase the risk of heart disease.

Apparently there’s a gene variation that makes some people naturally more grateful than others. You might know one — always looking on the bright side of things, Alfred E. Neumaneqsque “What, Me Worry?” smile on their faces like the Mona Lisa’a, ever assured that yes and o contraire Voltaire, we do live in the best of all possible worlds.

But don’t worry if you can’t find it in your natural makeup — they’re mutants. For most of us, Lurch-like we have to twist our mouths into a crooked smile of gratitude.

The research also indicates that while gratitude doesn’t do much to change one’s circumstances — same damn overcooked bird, same squawking relatives — gratituders tend to have much more satisfaction regardless of what the result. Which brings up the old question: would you rather be right, or happy?

Americans of faith are exceptionally grateful people, at least in church. Pew Research also reported that 82% of American Christians feel a strong sense of gratitude at least once a week; this compares to 67% of Americans who are faith-unaffiliated — atheists, agnostics or Nothings in Particular. Maybe the unaffiliated just don’t have the gratitude mutation as much.

Fortunately for them, there other tools than gratitude for improving the unacceptable. In another recent research, published in Organization Behavior and Human Decision Processes. it turns out that sarcasm may be more effective in coming up with creative solutions. In all its forms — from sarcastic anger to criticism to humor — sarcasm seems to exercise the brain. Apparently, greater abstraction is required to decode a sarcastic message, and this promotes creative thinking.

Added bonus, the benefit falls equally upon the deliverer as the recipient of the sarcastic remark.

Maybe it’s a low road — alcohol, as it turns out, also buzzes creativity — but when a sunnier view might be more pleasant, at least it’s comforting that we get to where we need to as much with a bon mot as a kiss. As Oscar Wilde believed, sarcasm may represent a lower form of wit, but it catalyzes a higher form of thought. So the satirists like to say, with their curled, snarky lip.

I wonder if both the high and low roads are necessary to get us through these complex, challenging, troublesome holidays in paradise. Call it Sarcasm Plus, or Gratitude Yeah But. It’s lovely this morning here in Mount Dora, perfect as our autumn peaches will now go, not really cool but blessedly not as hot. The news wire for this moment is quiet but just you wait; Twitter is a nervous bird of prey. Travellers are suffering the increased security at the airports but gas, oh gas, is cheaper now than sin. I’ve written long and late and earnestly and post this on a day when everyone’s about some other business.

So should a Godzilla balloon round the Empire State Building in Manhattan this morning, we should feel relief that the object of our fear is safely tethered up there in the air, but not to wonder when a blast of El Nino wind sends our fight with him earthward.

Happy Thanksgiving, all. Back to paradise.

— David Cohea ([email protected])