Howard Troxler: Fixing Florida will be fun to watch ... as a fan (his final column)

[seafan]

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

By Howard Troxler, Times Columnist
In Print: Sunday, June 12, 2011

.....

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.

.....

And in this moment, for various reasons, 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 They have repealed many of the laws that Florida passed trying to make itself a better state.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.

It was an earlier generation of Republicans and Democrats working together who tried to save our state. Making Florida better was never about Republican versus Democrat. Hardly a day passes that I do not hear from anguished, older Florida Republicans who are dismayed at what is happening. They say: This is not what we wanted.

Florida needs a world-class state university system or it will never be a great state. Florida needs to invest in itself. It needs to invest in public — yes, public — education. It needs a diverse, educated, intelligent workforce. Florida needs to protect what is left of the physical Florida. In every one of these arenas we are pointed the wrong way.

.....

Despite all this, lately I have been feeling more and more optimistic, precisely because more and more Floridians realize what is happening. This state is coming into an interesting and exciting time, a battle afresh for its future, and its soul.

.....

Howard Troxler (Times, 2007)



Thank you, Howard, for the many years you have informed us, cajoled us, celebrated and sorrowed with us. Florida is truly like no other place on Earth.

We will never forgo our mission to nurture and protect it.

Godspeed to you.

"Who owns Cross Creek? The red-birds, I think, more than I, for they will have their nests even in the face of delinquent mortgages..It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed, but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers, and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time..."

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, in Cross Creek