Yesterday was Earth Day. Earth Day! And yet our millions of earnest enthusiastic "likes," "shares" and "reblogs" failed to completely reverse thousands of years of humanity's thoughtless exhaustion of our life-giving planet's precious limited resources. But hey, don't feel down — just go out to the beach and pick up a couple of fucking red Solo cups, for God's sake. You can do it this weekend. No need to wait another 364 days. Also, pick up your dog's turds. The pigeons eat 'em and die, stuffing the sewer grates with their corpses so the snook can't breathe or whatever.
Our nation's Commander In Chief, Barack Obama, visited our own Everglades on Earth Day to make a bold statement about the need to acknowledge climate change as, you know, a real thing that's happening, despite our governor's insistence to the contrary. Rick Scott couldn't be there; he was too busy suing the federal government for taking away emergency healthcare money that would've been unnecessary had Florida accepted federal funds in the first place. Five bucks says we see leaked Republican emails saying the president looked "right at home in the jungle" before May rolls around, because I ran out of whatever wavering line of credit I was willing to extend to conservatives eight months or so ago.
The Florida House passed a bill requiring women wanting an abortion to sit through a mandatory 24-hour waiting period, as if the women in question haven't spent days agonizing over it before going to their doctors. The young female Republican representative who sponsored the bill, Jennifer Sullivan, framed the legislation as a defense for women who are being pressured (presumably by bad, bad men) into making the decision to terminate a pregnancy and, by inference, doesn't appear to know what the hell she's talking about. Perhaps we should draft a bill limiting the ability to draft a bill regarding abortion to our female representatives who have actually had one.
And finally (thankfully — are we really still talking about climate change and a woman's right to choose?), the news that Tampa is getting $1 million to "modernize" and expand the downtown-to-Ybor trolley from the FDOT has already drawn severe criticism, much of it complaining that the trolley isn't technically a citywide mass transit system at all. You know what's modern? Expanding mass transit. Taking steps toward the next thing. Reaching forward, knowing that mistakes might be made. Baby steps toward a more comprehensive rail system. Most of you can't drive worth a shit in any case, and any effort to get, like, five of you off the road gets my vote.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2015.