Bandwidth, Milton, and Karma
- Mike Dickey
- Oct 9, 2024
- 4 min read
"AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."
Like everyone else with ties to Florida, I find myself dithering useful minutes away this morning watching the impending disaster unfold as Milton approaches the Gulf Coast.
Well, I'm trying to watch; the bandwidth issues here at Tara continue, and it's starting to interfere with my workday with documents and images taking forever to load. I bought a repeater from Amazon a couple weeks back, finally got it to work and linked this computer to it. The speeds got even worse. I tried walking down to the dining room for a hearing yesterday, so I could be just a few feet from the router, and almost missed the beginning of the hearing because Zoom took so long to load. Not sure what's going on here, and not enamored with the obvious alternative of sending $125 a month to Crazy Elon for Starlink, a technology that actually works.
But back to Milton.
As the spaghetti models coalesce around the stretch of coast between Tampa and Sarasota, I feel a guilty sense of relief that Wyldswood sits well north and on the "good" side of the hurricane. Even a monster like this likely won't bring much more than borderline tropical storm-force winds, although that alone may be a problem with the piles of debris from the wrecked porch still sitting a few feet from the house. Down below, there's plenty of worry that those debris piles from Helene one can find all around the Tampa Bay are going to become clouds of projectiles thrown by Milton across Shore Acres and other recently swamped neighborhoods.
This all has the potential to be very, very bad, as bad as anything Florida has seen in my lifetime. I mean, Hurricane Michael will likely end up being a stronger storm, as was Andrew in 1992, but we've not seen one come through such a densely populated urban space before.
Besides relief, I have to admit a certain frisson of schadenfreude as the slight shift south means the most likely place to get completely wiped off the map will be Sarasota. I used to love Sarasota, loved eating burgers with Jim and PT outside at the Hob Nob, taking PT and Liam out for wings when I was in town for a hearing. I loved the surprisingly excellent art collection at the Ringling Museum, loved the vibe on St. Armand's Circle on a fall Friday evening. And of course, New College in all its quirkiness has a place in my heart after all those years of having kids and friends' kids in school there.
But that was before Covid, and the transformation of Sarasota County into the epicenter of right wing craziness.
It was even the situs of the infamous Moms for Liberty three-way scandal involving a member of the Sarasota County School Board.
Worst of all, they ruined New College in an act of political vandalism by the state's horrible governor.
I loathe that cockroach of a human being, hope he expires of a condition that involves extreme pain and his genitals catching fire. Did you see where his Department of Health is sending letters to TV stations in Florida, threatening them with criminal sanctions for running ads in favor of Prop 4?
Unbelievable. I guess they don't teach First Amendment law at that law school in New Haven from which he apparently graduated.
Anyway, I digress.
In the narrow theology carried around by the sort of people who are flocking to Sarasota, or at least were flocking there until yesterday when they started flocking onto I-75 north to escape death, these natural disasters, plagues, and the like were all God's way of slapping people for bad behavior. If one takes the Bible literally, there's certainly documentary evidence to support this premise---look at those poor Sodomites, for example.
So AIDS was punishment for being gay. Katrina was punishment for the Big Easy being the Big Easy. Covid was punishment for having a Pride Month. It just goes on.
I reckon tonight those folks get hoisted on their own petard. For at least the last eight years, they've spouted hate, sown division, and generally made this country a politically miserable place. They've wiped their backsides with the Beatitudes. Fuck my feelings, indeed.
They've denied anthropogenic climate change is real, and defiantly refused to do anything about it, doubling down on their bets by moving to the water's edge and buying homes that one could swamp with an outsized boat wake. Now their god is about to wipe their community off the face of the earth in a show of wrath that's virtually unprecedented in the history of the state.
Do I believe that? Of course not. And I feel appropriately guilty for my internal snicker at the irony of it all.
But I do believe in karma, at some basic My Name Is Earl level (if you're not familiar with the show, find it and watch it. Besides being one of the funniest situation comedies ever, it's probably the best written and kindest). I think at some cosmic level, we reap what we sow, how we treat the natural world and the least among us comes back to us. What we ingest, whether food or news, is ultimately what we become. I'm not quite there with Spinoza's pantheism, but there's a ring of truth in all that. And if your existence revolves around Fox News and fast food, propelling you into a cult built around hatred of your neighbors for how they look or who they love, the universe will eventually square up accounts with you, even if it's not immediately obvious to those around you.
Okay, time to take off the collar I gave up years ago, and come down out of the pulpit. I'll mourn with those who lose everything when the sunrise illuminates the mess on Thursday morning. I'm respectful of karma, after all. Besides, weren't we the ones weeping in our kitchen twelve days ago as we awaited the first images from Wyldswood?
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