Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected.

    I honestly cannot count the number of times over the last 20 years, that I was out covering a story when I thought:  “This situation calls for a Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected, fully armored vehicle."   That’s probably because I have never once thought that our community needed such a vehicle.  So you can imagine my surprise when I was driving by the Sheriff’s office here the other day when I spotted this monstrosity.

What you are looking at is just that, a mine sweeping fully armored, six wheel drive transport vehicle.  It is, for all intents and purposes the property of the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office.   That vehicle retails at just over a half a million dollars and it was paid for with your tax money.   The MRAP is one of nearly 180 of these units that the Department of Homeland Security has been handing out to local law enforcement agencies around the country.  For those of you who are math impaired, that comes out to about 90 million dollars worth of Mine Resistant vehicles.  I have been told that the Sherriff’s Office is leasing this vehicle from DHS for the grand total sum of zero dollars a year. 

    Now, I want to get it out off the top here that I am not taking a swipe at our Sheriff.  Quite the contrary, I don’t know too many people who would turn up their nose to the keys to a half million dollar vehicle.  I could certainly see myself being the envy of all my drunk neighbors down at the Redneck Yacht Club by showing up in that bad boy.  But I digress.  I am getting away from the point here.  I understand that the Sheriff intends to use this vehicle for his SWAT team.  For that to happen, the vehicle needs to be retrofitted.   I am not sure what this particular vehicle needs, but according to Undersheriff, Paul Trudeau in Jefferson County, New York, who also received one of the vehicles, retrofitting, will cost about $70,000.  That money is also coming out of your pocket. 

   Back in February, President Obama told the nation: “Weapons of war have no place on our streets”.  I guess he meant that weapons of war have no place on our streets unless he puts them there.  I would certainly agree that this particular vehicle does not belong on our streets. According to manufacturer specifications, this vehicle weighs 58,000 pounds.  It is so heavy that it has a very well documented history of destroying the very roads it is using to get around on.  If you read my blog, you will know that quite a few residents in this area pay for their own roads. Who exactly would cover any damage to roadways caused by this thing rumbling through the neighborhood?  Are we going to put that back on the residents again? Has the county even thought that through?

   Earlier this year, my son Alexander Robinson was home for a few weeks before he was deployed to the front lines in Afghanistan.  While he was home, he made it a point to purchase new uniforms.  YES we make our soldiers buy their own uniforms now.  He also ordered a bunch of gear online to have it sent to his deployment area.  I asked him why he was buying his own gear if the Army supplied them.  He told me that the gear they were being assigned was generally not very good and that to be well equipped the only way to do it was to purchase equipment for yourself. 

   So there it is.  We as a nation are failing to provide for our troops who are deployed, overseas, in a war zone, to give them the tools they need to stay alive and relatively comfortable on the fringes of hell.  Yet at the same time, we can afford to be sending half million dollar vehicles around the country to communities that neither want or need them.  I should think that these vehicles would better serve our troops fighting over seas.   Now, once this vehicle is retrofitted exactly what do we intend to do with it?  Are you going to load up your heavily armed officers and go blazing out to the next complaint of loud music?  If you listen to the tin foil behatted, the whole idea is to be prepared to strike down potential civil unrest in the future.  I just hope they don’t plan on driving down my road to do it. 

The fourth arm of the Government.

    Throughout my career as a journalist, I would occasionally stumble across a story that I did not want to do.  The worst moments for me were the ones where I would have to do a story about an elected official that I held some degree of respect for, which I knew was going to cast them in a negative light.  In those moments, I would turn to my father for guidance.  He would always tell me the same thing: “Son, the media is the fourth arm of the government.  Like it or not, it is your job to keep them honest”.   I made some of the toughest decisions of my career based on that advice and some of those days, the ride home was pretty solemn.

     Over the last 5 years or so, I started to see a trend in the news industry that really frightened me.  I need to quantify the statements to follow by giving you guys some back story about the television news industry.  Contrary to popular belief, TV news reporters do not make a lot of money.  Quite the opposite,  News Reporters are usually paid on par with fast food workers.  The lion’s share of the monies go to the main News Anchor, the Weatherman and the News Director.  This is a trend that really developed mostly over the last 20 years or so.  The end result of this is that most of the employees at news stations are typically in their 20’s, green behind the ears, and not very familiar with their own industry or what it represents.  They meek out a living on a paupers wage and focus all their energy in the struggle to get to the next job in another market, hoping it will pay a few more thousand dollars a year.  They are not concerned with the market where they work, only getting out of there as fast as possible.  The easiest way to do that is usually by finding the most sensational stories they can to pad their reel. (resume)

Newspapers and Television have been struggling for years now to stay relevant in the digital age.  With the advent of the internet, information started to become available on demand.  For the news industry that relied on deadlines and news programs at a pre set time of the day, the internet was a blow to their way of life.  News organizations that once focused on quality pieces done with care and precision were now dropping standards to a quantity over quality strategy.  Previous efforts on fact checking and accuracy fell victim to the need to turn 3 stories a day to feed the machine to generate revenue.

Let’s come back around to the green reporters that are now covering our local stories.  Let’s combine that with the fact that the government agencies, which are a great source of news stories, have also jumped on the digital age train.  These agencies have learned how to use computers to restrict the access to information previously available to journalists.  They have also wised up on how to use the use these new tools to clamp down on tips passed on to journalists by employees of respective agencies by tracking employee phone calls and busting down on people who speak with the media. Here is a good example   The end result of this is a parade of young reporters that are happy to take whatever a government agency feeds them without question and pass it on as breaking news.

I want to cite two frightening examples of this behavior that have been headline news in the Unites States recently.   Let’s start with George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.  Everyone knows the case.  But let me point out a few things that you may not have realized.    The media started reporting immediately that a defenseless Martin had been shot and killed in cold blood by a zealous Zimmerman for no reason.  They fed the flames of racism by running this picture of Martin.

Cherub Martin at 13

Over the course of two years, they never once attempted to show you the picture of the 17 year old martin that had attacked Zimmerman.  By the way, yes they did have access to this picture, they chose not to show it.

Now, let’s take this a step further.  The media reported that Martin had bought an iced tea and some skittles at a local quickie mart before being “ruthlessly and recklessly gunned down by a racist neighborhood watch captain”.  Well, the problem with all that is that he did NOT buy an iced tea.  He bought Arizona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail.  This item combined with the Skittles and  Robitussin created a cocktail called “lean”.  It was a cheap high that Martin had bragged about on his facebook page.  The media chose to ignore this fact in the light of political correctness and instead told folks that he carried an iced tea. 

Now, we have already uncovered two very blatant lies perpetuated by the media that were very easy to see.  I am going to throw the third one at you.  Throughout the entire Zimmerman trial. (Almost 2 years)  The media kept zeroing in on “Stand Your Ground” laws.  More specifically how the whole ordeal would have been different were it not for that law.   Here is what the new age journalists did not tell you:  Zimmerman relinquished his right to argue stand your ground during pre-trial.  During his entire trial, he argued self defense, not stand your ground.  Yet, after the trial was over, every major news network had specials about how we needed to revoke the stand your ground laws.  By this time I was screaming at the television to no avail.   My opinion about Zimmerman remains my own, but the coverage of this event is diabetic at best.

Let’s move forward to the bombing of the Boston Marathon.  The coverage of this event chilled me to the bone.  The bombing itself was horrible and catastrophic.   But the events that followed sent me to the store to stock up on ammunition.   You see, the 48 hours or so following the Boston Bombings, I watched as TV stations showed us video of SWAT teams going door to door in the Boston area “rescuing” people from their homes at gunpoint.  Subsequently the officers would search the homes of the “rescued” without a warrant.  I watched this unfold with horror as the news reporter rang out about how the police were rescuing people from their homes. 

I want to be perfectly clear on this point.  If you, or anyone comes to “rescue” me from my home with a Bushmaster AR 15 in hand with a black mask around your head, wearing all black…. Not only will I not be opening the door, but blood will most probably be shed on that day.  Produce a warrant or get the hell off of my land.   This notion is protected by the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.  It is most certainly the responsibility of the media covering these events to question these events.  Yet, none did.

Being evacuated "voluntarily" 

Yep, It's voluntary. 

More SWAT Voluntary action.

Once the suspect was caught,  I watched as the news station showed video of drunk college students partying in the streets, chanting “USA, USA, USA!"  I watched as CNN dropped back to an anchor who proclaimed:  “I saw someone this morning telling a Police Officer thank you.  We should all thank a Police Officer today."  Now, I am married to a Police Officer.  Yet, I do NOT appreciate my news anchors telling me what I should be thinking or doing, it’s not their job.  News Reporters should be questioning why the military state militia was going door to door and pillaging people’s homes in the name of terrorism.   Their job is to question why it happened in the first place.  But we all know that isn't going to happen.  They are no longer the fourth arm of the government, they are a puppet of the government.  

     It is for these reasons, along with too many other examples to cite, that I have parted ways with the career that I chose nearly two decades ago.  I started to find it hard to sleep at night knowing that the business I was working for was intentionally spreading lies into the homes of people who deserved and expected to have the truth.    

Uncle Boo Boo

     Over the years, I have grown much closer to my older sister.  In our youth, we had our knock down drag out fights.  As I recall, one of them even led to us not speaking for a couple of years.  But as age and wisdom fall on me, I have come to realize the value of family.  My sister Annie and I chose different paths in life and hers led her to a house full of kids and more recently grandchildren.   I had one child that I was unaware of until she was almost voting age. (that’s a story for another day)  I have come to covet the family that Annie has.  She has her problems no doubt, but the love that flows through her family is evident and every time I go home to her house in Illinois, I bask in the feeling of family that wraps me up like a hand knitted blanket.

 My sister Annie.

    Most recently, Annie has had the blessing of grandchildren.  Her 4 year old grandson Blaze is far and away the most engaging and entertaining of them.  Blazes (as we call him) is a spitfire four fifty four, four on the floor, full house—with a blower.  He is non stop, and fears nothing created by man.  It’s a pretty impressive trait in my opinion.   Now, around Annies house, I have always been known simply as “Uncle Howie."  Everyone, even my sister called me that.  It has always seemed fitting enough.  I was always the guy who escaped the family life and ran away and chased his dreams.  I know that a lot of the members of my family coveted the life I appeared to have.  I became the quasi popular, cool family member that everyone wonders about. 

     Blazes changed all of that in a single breath.  Last year, Annie called me and asked if she could come down with her husband and spend a week with us in sunny Florida.  I was delighted to say absolutely.  She called back a couple of days later and asked if it would be OK to bring a then 3 year old Blaze with them.  Melissa and I reveled at the idea of children’s laughter once again bouncing through our hallways and we both eagerly agreed.  So the date was set and we prepared for a week with the company of my family. 

 Blazes in Florida

True to his name, Blaze was a ball of energy.  He wanted to know about everything.  I would take him out to the barn in the morning telling him it was time to work.  “Werk! Werk!” he would exclaim as we were feeding the horses and the goats.  Despite his age, Blaze had some trouble grasping his talking skills, so even at the age of three and a half years old, he was still struggling with a lot of things he was trying to say.  When he got a word right he stuck to it.  Just ask our old neighbor Tim.  One night while we were sitting around the bonfire, Tim came home.  You could not see him, but we heard his truck pull up and the door slam.   I yelled into the darkness “Hey Tim."  Tim yelled back that he would be right over.

Blaze was aghast.  Did this man just yell the word Tim into the darkness and get a response?  So Blaze tried it.  “Tim, Tim, TIM!"  And Tim yelled back to Blaze.  “Yeah."  Then to Blazes amazement, a 6 foot tall burly redneck slid out of the shadows and joined us at the bonfire.  You could see it in his face that Blaze thought this was just the neatest thing ever.  He spent the rest of the night running around the fire yelling Tim’s name.  When he got tired of that exercise, he would come over and pull on my hand and say “Werk, Werk."  I had to explain to him that we had already fed the horses and it would have to wait until tomorrow. 

Now, up to this point, Blaze had not quite gotten my name down right.  Annie would ask him “who is that?"  Blaze would respond “ahgabhaha."  Annie would correct him “that’s Howie."  But he couldn’t seem to grasp it.  But that night, Annie had a stroke of genius.  She asked Blaze what happens when you fall down and hurt your arm?  She said “owie." “Owie” repeated Blaze.  She pointed at me and said “Howie."  “Howie” repeated the boy. Success! Annie repeated this a few more times to insure that Blaze had got the concept of my name down pretty well.  Then we put Blaze to bed and had a couple more beers before hitting the sack ourselves.

The next morning, my sister was anxious to put Blaze to the test and see if he could still remember my name.  As soon as we were all together in the kitchen, Annie looked at me and asked “who is that?" You could see Blaze was struggling to remember the previous nights lesson.  He looked at Annie and she pointed to her arm as a reminder.  You could see Blaze make the connection and at once jumped up and said “Boo Boo!"  The laughter was uncontrollable. I knew in an instant that I would be forever marked within my family. Word of the remark spread through my family like a fire.  Sure enough, from that day forward, I have become known as Uncle Boo Boo within my family circles. In my younger days, I may have found this a bit embarrassing, but now, it suits me just fine.  I just wonder if  Melissa understands, that this makes her Yogi.

Someone please tell me where I am.

Over the course of my life, I have claimed residence in well over a dozen different places in 2 countries.  For the last 15 years or so, I have called various locations in Charlotte County Florida my home.  Having traveled this earth, I have never seen so many people so utterly confused about where they live.  To quantify this, I think I may need to do a little explaining for my friends that do not live in my county.

Charlotte Harbor is where the Myakka and Peace rivers converge to empty into the Gulf of Mexico.  It is generally accepted that any area north of the harbor and between the two rivers is Port Charlotte, although Port Charlotte is not actually an incorporated town in the state of Florida.  (More on this in a bit).  South of the Peace River and the area eastward is loosely referred to as Punta Gorda, even though the area contains two separate incorporated cities: Punta Gorda and Cleveland.  West of the Myakka river is considered Englewood.   This all seems simple on the surface but it seems that some residents here work really hard to screw it up.

On the north side of the Peace River and east of Interstate 75 is a deed restricted community called Deep Creek.  For some reason, the folks in Deep Creek seemed to have made a community decision that they don’t want to be labeled as living in Port Charlotte or Charlotte County (where they actually are) and have taken to telling anyone who will listen that they live in Punta Gorda.  Despite the fact that an entire river separates them from the actual city limits of Punta Gorda.  Because of this, it is all too common to find some poor lost person wandering through Punta Gorda searching for an address that is 10 miles away on the other side of the bridge.

We also see this a lot in the Englewood area where addresses are listed as being in Port Charlotte.  This one happens mostly on business listings in advertisements and on the internet where a map program generally labels any residence in Charlotte County as Port Charlotte.  Although this is for the most part accurate, it can be extremely frustrating to realize you need to drive an extra 20 miles to get to something you thought was right up the road.   The residents of Englewood generally recognize where they live however and they do not seem to be causing the confusion here.

Now, heading south of the rivers, we find our only 2 incorporated towns in Charlotte County.  Punta Gorda has established city limits. They have their own taxes and their own government and police force.  There are 2 very easy ways to tell if you live in the city of Punta Gorda.  If you pay your property taxes to the City of Punta Gorda, congratulations, you live in Punta Gorda.  If you can’t remember who you pay your taxes too, that’s OK.  Walk outside and look at the street sign on the street where you live.  Is it blue or green?  If it’s blue, you live in Punta Gorda, if it’s green, you do not.  If it’s made out of concrete, you live in The Ranchettes.  If it’s missing, you may want to consider moving to a better neighborhood.

I promised that we would talk about incorporation.  If you want your geographical area to be recognized as a city in the state of Florida, you need to fill out an application with the state and become incorporated.  This allows you to establish a local government and collect taxes and such.   About a hundred years ago or so, the area in Charlotte County east of Interstate 75 petitioned the state for incorporation as the city of Cleveland.  The state accepted the application and the City of Cleveland was born, only to promptly fade away.  You see, as funny as it sounds, the fine folks of Cleveland quickly forgot that they had become a city, and over the years the idea all but vanished.  Just over a decade ago, the local newspaper rediscovered that Cleveland was incorporated.  There was a sudden mad rush for a few residents wanting to run for mayor, only to drop it once again.

Now, I live in Cleveland.  When I tell people that I live in Cleveland they almost always ask: “Where?"  I try to be patient and explain to them that Cleveland  is a town and where it is located.  A lot of residents who actually live in Cleveland do not realize that they live in their own town.  They too are guilty of telling people that they live in Punta Gorda, which only adds to the confusion.  Once again, go check the color of the street sign on your road.  And finally, to add insult to injury, some of the folks who do live in Punta Gorda can’t even decide what the name of their own town is.  While most of the populace will refer to the town as “poonta gorda”, you still get the occasional die hard who just won’t let go of the Spanish pronunciation of “punt-ah gorda”.  Maybe it’s time for a community meeting so we can all sit down and figure out where the hell we are at. 

She Red 'cause she red.

As I loosely grasped the reins, I gave a little suggestion with my heels and up came my horse.  Standing on his hind legs, I took off my hat and used it to wave to the cheering crowd that had gathered for the downtown Christmas Parade.  Well, at least that’s the way it was in Howieland, a little place I like to go in my head sometimes.   The reality was, I was 40 years old and I had never ridden a horse before. Yet, I was standing in front of a round pen in east Charlotte County looking at an animal that I knew very little about.  The picture on Craigslist had really sold me to come look.  It was a picture of 2 young teen girls riding this animal bareback.  Seemed like a good first horse for me.  I was now watching one of them ride her around that pen with no issues. 

“Classy” was in a lot of ways, not what I had envisioned for my first horse. She is a red and white American Paint.  I did not really want a mare, but she seemed to have the right personality.  A little bit of summer itch, but I knew I could help clear that up.  We had been informed that the animal had suffered a couple of years of serious abuse earlier in her life, but she seemed to be doing fine now.  Melissa got on her next and rode her out onto the road.  No issues.  She rode up to me and said: “If you don’t buy this animal, I will,  do you want to ride her?" I said: “Nope, I’ve seen enough, put her in the truck."  (I really did not want to demonstrate my lack of horsemanship in front of all these people.)  I paid the woman the asking price and we headed for home.  I was pretty content with my purchase but that name, that name HAD to go.

I knocked around a few ideas for a new name.  Melissa had already purchased a horse named Blanco (Spanish for white), so I eventually settled on Red.  It makes Melissa crazy to hear it but when people ask me why I chose that name, I say: “She Red ‘cause she red”.  It kept eating at the back of my mind that Red had come at a bargain price.  There had to be a get and it didn’t take me long to find out what it was: Red don’t like men.  It became obvious that the abuse she had suffered earlier had come at the hands of a man, and she had marked all men as bad in her head.

 I struggled through putting a saddle on her a couple of times.  Then the day came for my first ride.  I worked for over an hour tacking her up.   With Melissa’s supervision I tried to climb up.  Just as I was almost up, she swung her butt away from me and I missed.  The second try was better with Melissa holding her still.  Our first ride was probably hilarious to watch.   As soon as I was up, Red walked all the way down the side of our barn, pushing my leg into every stall door, fixture and opening along the way.  The pain was enough to make me scream, but I was not done, no sir.  As soon as she reached the end of the barn, she turned around and came back the other way, this time crushing my right leg all the way down the barn.  That was my first ride with Red, and she had obviously won.

So it went with every session I tried to have with her.  She would throw me down, or absolutely refuse to move for me.  Her favorite trick was to move her butt while I was climbing up.  Over the next year, she broke three of my bones.  I had been bitten, kicked, knocked down and shoved around. On more than one occasion I stomped hobbled through the house claiming I was going to sell that animal to the glue factory.   Then, I quit smoking.  After that, she did warm up a lot.  I assume the former male abuser had been a smoker.  Leaving that smell behind probably made her more comfortable.  I also noticed that she had taken on the alpha role with the other horses.  She was large and in charge and she knew it.  Something else for me to worry about.

I tried everything to get her to respect me.  Food bribes, brushing, I cured her summer itch and showed her in every way I could, that I loved her.  Nothing worked.  At my wits end, I thought I would try something dramatic.  I separated her from the rest of the horses one night and I locked her in the pond pasture, alone, with me.  Horses are herd animals.  They like to be around other horses.  If other horses are not available, they will eventually try to hang out with whatever animal is available.  In this case, that was going to be me. It was a tactic that I had only read about.  I turned my back to her and refused to acknowledge her existence.  I stood there for over 2 hours ignoring my horse.  She would attempt little moves to make eye contact with me but I would just turn away and move.  Just about the time I thought should have been reading about recipes with horse meat in them, it happened.  Red walked up to me and lowered her head.  She made the effort to force me to look her in the eye and put her head on my chest.   I knew what she was saying: “OK, you win."  It was a breakthrough.

After that, Red was a different horse, at least to me.  She showed me how to ride and started putting up with my mistakes.  I took her on numerous rides through the trails in my neighborhood and we had a blast.  Everybody wanted to ride her.  I let a couple of people try, but she really wanted nothing to do with that. It seemed like in her head, it was Howie or nobody.  I was finally on the road to being a Cowboy. (at least in my mind).   But there was one more thing.  I knew I had to do it and Melissa tried several times to talk me out of it.  I was going to take Red downtown and ride in the Punta Gorda Christmas Parade. 

I had never tested Red around so much noise and traffic.  If a horse spooks and bolts, falling off can be a very painful affair.  Not only did Red keep her wits about her that day, she showed exemplary skills in the alpha role by working to calm down the other horses that did spook.  The kids all gushed at her pretty colors and rushed up to pet her all without a single issue.  It was a 5 hour affair to get to the end of the parade route.  It was the longest time I had ever spent in the saddle.  When I climbed down, I realized that her cinch strap (the main strap holding the saddle on the horse) had broke.  Red had to have known it was not tight and she had obviously worked to make sure I did not fall off.  Melissa was there to greet us.   She said: “You know, lesser men would have given up on that animal a long time ago, I am so very proud of you."  It was not the standing ovation I had pictured--it was a thousand times better.  I loaded up Red and headed for home with a smile so big, my teeth almost fell out.

Red still likes to pull that little butt swing maneuver.  It’s her favorite gag I guess.




Update:  After a short battle with what we suspect to be a liver related illness, we had to put Red down on August 21'st, 2016.  Rest in Peace darling- you taught me so much.

Tragedies and Blessings.

I was staring down my mid life crisis.  It was the eve of my 40th birthday and we were living in a deed restricted community in Florida. It was, by all accounts, the American dream.   We had someone else mowing our manicured lawn.  We had a company that came by weekly and checked our in ground pool and added water if we needed it.  I had a dock with sail boat access to the Gulf Of Mexico.  Living on a cul-de-sac in Punta Gorda Isles was considered a privilege reserved for the well off in our community and we were in the center of it.  One night Melissa and I were watching TV and enjoying a lukewarm glass of Merlot, Melissa turned to me and without batting an eye, she says: “Lets buy a farm."  I damn near peed myself sitting on our luxurious sectional couch.

The saddles that we had in our living room were a warning to me that I had failed to heed for years.  I knew that my beloved had always held a special place in her heart for the outlying areas where cattle and horses graze.  I took a moment to process the suggestion.  Honestly, what boy never dreamed of being a cowboy with his loyal steed? Riding the trails, six gun on his hip?  I very nervously replied: “OK."  So our adventure into the country began.  We settled on a three bedroom home.  The house had a configurable 8 stall barn attached to the garage.  The whole property is about 10 miles outside of town on five acres. It was a bank owned short sale and it took us 18 months to close on the property.   I cashed in my meager retirement fund to rehab the house and land to suit the woman who had dedicated her love to me.  I was honored to do it, and in the end we found ourselves in a place that we both fell in love with.

Well, now we had a problem.  Here we sat on an 8 stall barn and not a single animal to our name.  Time to shop for a horse I guess.   We both searched Craigslist for months looking for just the right animal.  Then, there he was. A pure white and a little flea bitten Arabian gelding.  His name: Blanco- Spanish for white.  I sent Melissa up to Sarasota to bring home our new tenant.  She showed up about 8 hours later flushed with frustration and saying that Blanco had been more than a hand full to try to get into the trailer. But there he was in all his glory sitting in our front paddock.  I had had 18 months to read up on horses and specifically their behavior.  I knew that this moment was going to be critical in establishing our relationship in the future.

I was standing at the fence line when they opened the gate to the trailer.  I knew that he was going to run up to me.  I was also well informed that it was very important that I did not flinch when he did.  Out he burst from that trailer and headed straight for the fence where I was standing.  Sure enough, at a distance of about 3 feet, I jumped back and immediately regretted it.  As that gelding turned to head the other way I caught a glimpse of his gaze, and I swear I could very easily read what he was saying: ” I got your number."

For the next couple of months, Blanco minded me, but he never really respected me.  I knew it was the end result of our first encounter where I showed him I was afraid, but I did not know how to fix it.  Then the worst thing imaginable happened.  Blanco foundered.  In a nutshell, founder is a condition that causes the horses body to produce a chemical that attacks their hoofs.  The worst case scenario is akin to having your ankle bone shoved through the bottom of your foot.  In such cases, founder is most certainly fatal.  Blanco was bedridden for months.  Locked in a stall where we worked tirelessly to try to save his life.  Doctors, x-rays, medications, foot wraps, and farriers became the norm.  It also became normal to find one of us sleeping in the stall all night, holding Blanco’s head off the cold floor of the stall while he slept, in an effort to offer him some additional measure of comfort.

Eventually, Blanco started to show signs of improvement.  We had special made horseshoes put on him that slowed the progress of the founder and helped him regain a lot of his mobility.  The lingering question that we constantly batted around: “Will we ever get to ride him?" The answer was always just out of our reach.   As he recovered, I noticed something.  His attitude toward me had changed.  I could always tell that he was exceptionally smart, and now he was letting me see it.  He listened to me now and showed sincere signs of affection when I was around him.  In my human narcissism, I came to the conclusion that the animal had come to respect me because I had helped take care of him during his illness.  Boy was I dead wrong about that one. Blanco respected me now, but for an entirely different reason than I had concluded.

I found the answer in a book written by a very smart old Cowboy named Buck Brannaman.  (The Horse Whisperer movie was based on him.) You see, we humans are predators.  Horses are prey animals.  They know this full and well.  When a horse looks at you it is always measuring you up as a potential threat to their life.  In the wild, predators kill their prey most prominently by asphyxiation via the neck.  They attack, bring down the prey and use their jaws on the animals neck to choke it to death.  Brannaman had explained the process wherein you hold down a horse on the ground and exert pressure via a knee on the side of its neck.  Doing this causes the animal to believe that you are going to kill it.  The end result is that the horse, unable to get up, comes to the conclusion that it is going to die and gives up hope.  This process is used to break unruly animals and is not recommended as a regular training tool because of the psychological impact it can have.

So there was my answer.  Those nights where I was sitting on the floor of that stall, holding Blancos head in my lap, I had inadvertently bonded with him.  Not because he basked in the attention I was giving him, but because he was utterly terrified that I was going to kill him.  When he realized that I would not take his life, he respected me for not doing so.  It is truly marvelous how arrogant we can be as humans when we don’t pay attention to nature.  The day finally came when we realized that it would be forever out of my grasp to ride Blanco.  But when that time came, I had learned how to communicate with him and compare him to the behavior of some of the other horses.  I can still easily see how marvelous he would have been under saddle.  Blanco is the kind of horse that cowboys train to do all form of amazing tricks.  I know now, that it will truly be one of the great tragedies of my lifetime that I never got to ride him.  It will also go down as one of the biggest blessings that I had the opportunity to learn from him.

Blanco is still with us.  He spends most of his time manicuring my new lawn.

Ghost riding the Po Po.

“Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry”  Thomas Jefferson. 

I want all of you to keep that quote in the back of your mind while you are reading this post.   A couple of months ago, I started to notice something odd.  Pulling out of my road and turning onto U.S. 17 in Cleveland, I caught sight of a Sheriff’s Office cruiser sitting in the median between the two lanes.  A quick check of my seat belt and I stepped on the gas.  Pulling out, I noticed that the car lacked a deputy.  It was just sitting there in the right of way.  Later that night when I returned, the vehicle was still there, in the same spot,  as vapid as the minds of most of our elected officials.

There the cop car sat for four more days.   Then it was gone.  A couple of days later, the vehicle reappeared down the road a ways and parked once again in the right of way.  And so it has been for a couple of months watching the empty squad car sitting in various locations along Route 17.   I understand what is going on.  The vehicle is being parked and left in the hopes that speeders will see the car and slow down assuming that there is a deputy running radar and writing traffic citations to fill his quota.  Thereby hoping to minimize traffic accidents and such.

WARNING: Legalese follows.  Now, Florida state statute 316 covers this kind of thing.  I will save you the technical jargon and give you the highlights.  316.194 says that if a vehicle has been left within 30 feet of the pavement edge for a period exceeding 48 hours, it is the responsibility of law enforcement to have the vehicle towed to a safe location and stored at the owners expense.  There are exceptions written into the law for law enforcement, however in every law I can find, the legislation implies that exceptions are for Officers performing an action in the line of duty. Since there is no Officer present, it is hard to see where he or she might be performing anything in a line of duty.

Now I would like to challenge any one of my readers to go park your vehicle on the median of a state road and see how long it takes for it to disappear.  No, go ahead, I’ll wait.  I’ll bet that car disappears pretty quickly.  In fact, a Florida Highway Patrol officer I spoke with told me that they rarely tolerated such apparently abandoned vehicles for longer than 6 hours before taking action.  And there is a very good reason for this.  Vehicles sitting in the right of way can quickly go from being a nuisance to become a full blown traffic hazard.  What may have been a recoverable loss of control into the median can quickly become a head on collision with a parked car resulting in serious injuries.  Now picture that scenario with a county owned vehicle and imagine the legal liabilities that would follow.

So, the question you knew was coming: Why is it OK for the Sheriff to leave his vehicles scattered in the right of way on roads in the county and not OK for the rest of us to do it? Why does the Sheriff not do what any of us would have to do and ask a property owner if we could park our vehicle on their property for a few days? Is it because they are law enforcement and they believe that this law does not apply to them?  If that is the case, what other laws do they believe do not apply to deputies?  I would defer you back to the first thing I made you read when you clicked on this page.  Certainly parking your car does not on the surface appear to be a form of tyranny.  However, when we the people elect officials and grant them authority under our Constitution, we expect them to follow the rules and the laws that they swore to protect.  Remember, tyranny never starts as a full blown assault.  It starts with the little things and grows from there… 

Origins

     Recently, I was stopped by someone I recognized but was not entirely able to identify.  I knew that I had encountered him in my work as a Journalist in Charlotte County.   He drove up to me as I was crossing the parking lot at a gas station.  He immediately said to me: “I was talking with some people the other day and we decided that you need to start writing a blog”.  He continued:  “Since you are no longer beholden to other people, you should write about the stuff that you were not allowed to touch before”.  Unbeknownst to him, I had already created a blog.  I have not really updated it regularly, but I gave it some serious thought.

Now I am seeing that a blog may be a good outlet to vent some of my thoughts and observations about things going on around me.  I did want to take the time early on to explain the name I chose for my little corner of the internet: From Soup To Nuts.  For those in the know, soup to nuts is an American idiom that refers to the idea of beginning to end.  It is an old reference that refers to eating an entire meal.   Soup being the first course and nuts being the last.   So the idea for the name basically means to cover a little bit of everything.  But alas, the name has a far deeper meaning for me.

I was born in a small corner of Illinois in 1970.  Very early on in my life,  Mary Wiss Grace was an integral part of my life.  Mary stood all of five foot nothing and weighed 98 pounds soaking wet. She lived about 100 miles down the Mississippi river from me in a little town called Keokuk Iowa. She was a God fearing woman through and through.  She never took any slack from any of the eleven children she had reared.  She taught them the ways of the Lord and if they got out of line, she was not afraid to use the rod to put them in their place.  Her oldest and first born son was Joseph Grace—my father.  He also used the rod to put his children in their place.  Something I still value to this day.

Throughout my entire 43 years, I have never met a person that addressed me with more unconditional love that my grandmother.  Her grandchildren were her life.  She held us lovingly and told us the stories of King James and would absolutely shred anyone who dared threaten her grandchildren.  It is so very hard to put into words how much of an impression this woman had on my life.  I was seven years old when she died.  She was killed in a terrible automobile accident at work.  I will never forget the day my father told me.  We were living in California at the time and I was not able to attend her funeral, although I was told it was a magnificent affair.

At the age of 13, we moved back to Iowa.  We lived with my Grandfather.  I spent many hours searching through my Grandmothers old things in the attic of her former Victorian home on Franklin Street.   Mary had been a pretty well known local artist and political cartoonist.  She had gone to art school in Chicago and came back to Iowa and eventually took a job at the local paper, The Daily Gate City.  She wrote a column for years for that newspaper called “Soup to Nuts”.   It is from this that I have taken the humble name for my little corner of the web.  I have spent my entire adult life trying to follow in her footsteps as best I can.  I tried to be a good journalist although some people did not seem to approve.  Although my career as a news reporter seems to have waned,  I still try to follow the lessons of King James and Mary Grace.   It is in her honor that I give you the title to my little corner of the web.  I only hope that I can honor her memory to the extent that it deserves. 

I love you Grandma….. I miss you so much.

Who owns the road?

     I live in the country.  There I said it.  A couple of years ago, we made a decision to get out of town. We purchased a small 5 acre farm in Cleveland Florida on a quaint little road.  The road we live on is a giant loop.  It curves back on itself and we have about 40 or 50 neighbors who share out little road.  Our road is not a thoroughfare—in other words, our road is not used for commuting.  If you are driving on the road, you are either going to or from a home on that road.    You can not really use Cleveland Drive to get from one destination to another.

      Now, because our road is not a thoroughfare, Charlotte County refuses to spend collective tax money to pave or maintain it.  They do not feel that the residents of the county should foot the bill for a roadway that only the residents of that road use regularly.  Instead, the county uses something called a Municipal Services Benefit Unit (M.S.B.U.) to tax the residents on Cleveland Drive to pay for our own roadway.  Let me put this into perspective for you.  Our annual property taxes are about a thousand dollars a year, give or take.  The MSBU charge is about twelve hundred dollars.  Those collective monies are put into an account that is used to pay for paving and maintaining our road surface. 

     Lately a growing group of cyclists has taken to using our roadway for a scenic Tour-De-Cleveland.   The bikers are not noisy, they don’t litter, and they certainly don’t tear up the road surface.  For the most part, the cyclists don’t bother me too much.  We have the luxury of some of the best neighbors one could hope for, and  I have heard some of them muttering about the bikers being road hogs and disregarding stop signs.  But that is a story for another day.  

Last week, I noticed that the county had come through our one way, dead end neighborhood roadway.  They have placed signs at nearly every intersection that are obviously  road markers directing cyclists where to go on their ride.   Now, I do have a problem with this.   When Charlotte County refuses to contribute to the upkeep of our roadway under the pretext that only we use it, then directs any traffic down our road, then the County needs to step up and start contributing to the upkeep and maintainence.   If the cyclists want to come down the road on their own accord, so be it.  But what business does Charlotte County have of turning our road into a racetrack, a tourist route, or any other destination for anyone other than the residents?

Furthermore, I would really like to know if our tax money is being used to install said signs.  A person who works for the Charlotte County Public Works Department told me that the cyclists had approached the county with the proposition that they would pay for the signage if the county would install them.  If this is indeed the case, again I have a problem with it.  Who are these people to determine what signage goes up on a roadway that we exclusively pay for?  I feel that if this is true,  then the cyclists should at the very least have approached the residents of the neighborhood before they started spray painting our road surfaces (they have been doing this for years to direct each other on their routes) or putting up signage that we neither asked for or wanted.