Needs fixing...and fast!

PART I

This must be just like livin' in Paradise.
And I don't wanna go home.
Just like Paradise. Just like Paradise.

- David Lee Roth, 1986

Ahhhh, Florida. The sunshine state. Land of the free, home of the expression, "Three T-shirt - 10 dollah". Orange groves replaced by endless rows of living communities that if you're prone to drunk driving, would make it nearly impossible for you to find your own house, since it looks just like everyone else's house. The Miami area - or as I like to call it - "New Jersey South", with it's pink highrise's that look suspiciously like the gray highrise's in Newark.

Oh, I'm sorry. That's mauve - not pink. My bad.

Florida, who's number one import seems to be cement. Florida, the place where they print an election ballot that 90% have no problem understanding, but 10% are obviously too stupid to...and the 10% say they tried to vote for Al Gore, but instead Mr. Ed led the electorate in Palm Beach county (Yes; I had the same "Butterfly" ballot in my county, and had no problem with it - and Mr Ed lost).

Florida...it just can't seem to stay out of the news, can it?

Why is Florida the bastion of retardedness it seems to be? Well, there are several reasons for this, primarily no state tax, the promise of warm weather, and a plethora of service industry jobs for the unskilled and uneducated. This has led to a progression in the state that started over 50 years ago. Initially, Florida was the winter destination of the elderly, where the term "snowbird" was coined. Then Walt showed up with the mouse in Orlando, and the minimum wage explosion began. Finally, as factories folded up north in favor of outsourcing to other countries, people came here in droves; people without much going on for them. Florida has long since been just a vacation spot, as families dominate the landscape, and millions of children now live here. Most of them, children of the above-mentioned imports.

Floridians will hate this blog; but it's true.

We as citizens of this state contribute to the issues, sometimes directly...sometime indirectly. The aforementioned election fiasco, mismanaged from a PR (and possibly legal) perspective by then Secretary of State Katherine Harris; the Jessica Lundsford murder; Carlie Bruscia, abducted and murdered on Super Sunday in 2004; Hurricane's ripping the place to shreds two years in a row; Orlando becoming more dangerous than NYC in the last year and a half with respect to the murder rate; and most recently, the raid and arrest of several pharmaceutical laboratories in Orlando that were manufacturing steroids, human growth hormone, and pain killers, then selling them on-line to prominent athletes, movies stars, and the most horrifying of all - high school football coaches nationwide.

And what do we Floridians do about it? Nothing.

TO BE CONTINUED...