Yesterday my wife and I took a drive down Ft. Myers Beach to see how it was doing. We try to check on how the beach community is recovering.  It has been just about 16 months since Hurricane Ian wreaked havoc on the whole area but one of the worst hit was Ft. Myers Beach. Most mornings the local news stations carry stories about the positive things that have happened in the area during its recovery. The New Margaretville is now open and taking bookings which is positive.  The Pink Shell is open and the Lanai Kai’s beach bar is open from 10 to 5. Yes, there is progress but most of the Island looks like a war zone. All the recovery stories are great but what is lost is all the people that recovery is still a long ways off or will never happen. We had the Red Coconut RV Park that sold for 54 million dollar. That is a huge profit for the owners that bought it for 700,000 dollars back in the 1980s. The stories that you don’t hear about are the people that occupied that park for years with their mobile homes and trailers that lost everything. Where do they all go? How do they recover? Those are the stories that the news never tells but they are the ones that I think about when I drive past the site. You could call them all the lost dreams.

We have a friend Marge that had a place in one of the parks along Summerlin Ave. Her place was completely destroyed by the Hurricane. She owned the own lot but it would cost too much money to put a place up that was up to the new codes. She sold the lot and now just lives permanently up in Michigan. Her life was turned completely upside down and in reality she had no means to recover. Marge will do ok because she is a survivor but not everyone will. Those are the stories that just get lost and for every success story there are over a hundred to stories that will never be what would be considered a success. We celebrate the success of the few and ignore the suffering of the rest. People’s lives have been turned upside down so I for one have a hard time celebrating our successes and forgetting the tragedies that will never be corrected.

With our changing weather our natural disasters are getting all too common. Our tornado season used to be a Springtime event. Now it appears that every season is tornado season. As of January 16^th we have already 43 tornados and we normally average 34 for the entire month. Climate change is not only changing the temperature but also the everything else that the weather delivers. This is our dry season in Florida and we have had flooding in the Ft. Myers area. We can have record warm temperatures all over the country in the summer and then have record cold temperatures in the winter. I personally think that it is probably too late to reverse much of the climate change that we have going on around us but what really bothers me is that they are not preparing enough to avert disasters like what happened here in Southwest Florida from Hurricane Ian. We are still building on the barrier islands. During Ian most of Sanibel Island was under water, I am sure that Estero Island and much of Pine Island was underwater too. Matlacha was pretty much washed away with very few build surviving the storm surge. Yet we are still rebuilding on these same barrier islands knowing that a storm like Ian will happen again. Let’s face it; we are building on sandbars that nature will eventually wash away.

In Florida we have an example of a community that was built with the changing climate in mind. The place is called Babcock Ranch and of all the communities it seemed to survive Hurricane Ian the best. Maybe we have to be looking at all our communities with the idea of how will they survive in the changing climate that will be effecting all us wherever we live. Being that this is the sunshine state Babcock Ranch took advantage of solar power and has its own solar panels. The structures are built to handle the weather that this area seems to dish out. Every areas needs for the future will be a little different but we need to be searching for those solutions. Disney had a movie called Tomorrow Land and that is what we need to be looking toward, tomorrow. They also have a major section of their theme park called Tomorrow land that showed what they thought that the future held for us. We need to always be trying to reinvent Tomorrow Land for the future of our children and grandchildren.

Thinking about tomorrow is forward thinking and not backwards thinking. I personally will vote for those people that are not only worried about today but also about tomorrow. Of the two major political parties the difference can’t be emphasized more. The Republicans are the party of denying that Climate Change is real, they are not the party that will even attempt to solve the challenges of tomorrow. The Democrats are the more progressive of the two, for the most part, looking for new solutions and new technologies. Even the Democrats are not progressive enough because they fear that they won’t get elected if they go too far outside of the box but outside the box is what is necessary. New technologies and new and better environmental goals are what we need but we will get nothing with the Republicans in charge. If your solution is outdated technology and rolling back environmental standards don’t come looking for my support because you won’t get it. I have always said that doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is my definition of insanity. Too many Republicans are just plain nuts.