BS for Life

It’s much worse than you think, but that’s not so bad

By Rebecca Wakefield

Last week, the Florida Lottery unveiled a new way to part fools from their money — Gas for Life. For five bucks, you can buy the illusion that the government will do something about your gas problem.

It’s another gimmick, much like the lottery itself has been for the last 20 years. Sure, we’ve raised more than $18 billion for education. Why then is our education system so under-resourced? The reason for the disparity is that the Lotto is one of those tricks, like gas-tax holidays or offshore drilling, that distills complex problems to a comforting, if imaginary, simple solution.

Allowing ourselves to be so easily comforted, however, means the actual problem is put off until the next crisis point. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Florida’s fraught relationship with its water, which has been on full display the past few weeks.

On one hand, the state is proposing to buy and (eventually) shut down most of the sugar plantations around Lake Okeechobee because the fertilizers used to grow the cane are helping to kill the Everglades.

Perfect timing, as the federal Environmental Protection Agency decided a few weeks ago that it wouldn’t stop the state’s water managers from continuing to dump dirty water from farms and yards into the glades. And the feds in recent years have appeared to essentially give up on the massive $11 billion-plus Everglades restoration plan they approved nearly a decade ago, with little outcry from the public.

The problem is that we have too many competing interests and little sense of how to balance them all. South Florida has major problems with water. We’re a big, swampy, subtropical sandbar, plagued by poor drainage and a shallow water table. We’ve always got either too much or too little water.

When there’s too little, plants burn, salt water intrudes, sinkholes open. When there’s too much, we flush it out to sea via the huge network of drainage canals that extend west, east and south from Lake Okeechobee. The lake itself has been pretty much killed off by decades of being used as a giant holding tank for polluted water.

Similarly, we flush our barely treated sewer water out to sea, where it contributes to algal blooms, fish kills and general yuckiness that occasionally require beach closings. We allow rock mining too close to the well fields from which we draw our drinking water, which has the potential to pollute it. We allow development in places that only contribute to the drainage and water pollution problems we already enjoy.

We do all these things because they are the cheapest, easiest method, or because someone important is making money. We must to come to terms with the real costs of things. And that includes the fact that our waste is expensive. Everything we throw away goes somewhere, and it’s not going to be cheap to deal with anymore.

The late, great George Carlin had an observation about how we like to kid ourselves with comforting BS. He talked about how we got from the term “shell shock” to describe what happens to soldiers in combat, to today’s euphemistic “post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“American English is loaded with euphemisms, ’cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality,” he said. “Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation.”

That’s why I’m kinda lovin’ this bad economy. It’s a good time to strip away the fairy tales and find out what we’re made of.

We’ve all been reading about layoffs — teachers, bus drivers, journalists. The journalism world has been rocked in South Florida, with all three major dailies announcing major staff cuts in the same month. Everybody is trying to find a way to make it to the next safe harbor. Many can’t imagine how they will, without a regular paycheck. Even people with jobs are working fewer hours, or finding that their checks are worth less now that gas and food costs so much more.

But, you know, I kind of like a crisis now and then. It’s like when a hurricane hits and you finally find out your neighbor’s names because suddenly everybody has to work together. You discover an unexpected flair for making canned tuna taste like gourmet. You experience a profound sense of achievement from getting enough clean water for a shower.

Think back to your favorite family stories. Chances are, they’re the ones that start with something going wrong. How you got through, the vital adventure and funny misadventure of it, that’s what you remember.

It feels good to get away a bit from the culture of stuff. I remember watching my mom cut coupons and shop for school clothes in thrift stores, and recycle leftovers. It made the treats and the splurges special. I remember my dad finding ways to develop new skills when a business failed, or a market dried up.

The key to survival is having a flexible, opportunistic outlook, but also one that is grounded in what’s really important. That’s a great lesson to learn. It won’t hurt us to learn it again.

Something else that’s vital is for us to connect the personal lessons to the larger ones about how we use and shape the world we live in. There are solutions to public education, the environment, even gas prices. But they are not simple and we can’t get there by ignoring the hidden costs to every transaction.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com