In My Hometown…

…there exists, according to a State Farm survey done focusing on motor vehicle accidents, the most dangerous intersection in America. I am quite confident you find this piece of information very comforting, knowing that the most dangerous intersection in America is not in your hometown. Part of the reason there are so many accidents at this intersection is the heavy volume of traffic that passes through it each day. Many of the various drivers of these vehicles seem to view traffic signals as decoration intended to spruce up the community, completely unaware that they serve a purpose other than aesthetic enhancement. A scene in the movie Starman, depicts Jeff Bridges character intently absorbing the driving methods of Karen Allen’s character. When it is Bridges turn to drive, he blatantly runs a red light, much to the irate dismay of Allen. As she reprimands him, he explains “Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go faster.” A similar principle is often instituted here In My Hometown…
…to combat this rampant problem, cameras were installed at strategic intersections throughout the city. When a scofflaw enters the intersection after the light has turned red, a picture is taken of the automobile’s license plate, and the driver is to be issued a ticket for the offense. I don’t know at what cost to the cities taxpayers these little technological monitoring marvels went for, but it must be racking up a ton of revenue if what I have witnessed lately is any indication. You see In My Hometown…
…there are so many folks on the city payroll with many important duties, that there is no one available to answer my questions over the phone. I need to make a formal request in writing via the Pembroke Pines website, detailing the exact information I require. I am told depending on the questions, “they” may get back to me within seventy-two hours, maybe longer. Boy! “they” sure are busy In My Hometown…
…it wasn’t always that way. When I moved here in 1993, there were only about fifty-five thousand residents. The year before, there were even less. But in August of 1992, Hurricane Andrew swept through Miami-Dade County, destroying pretty much everything in its path, inciting a mass exodus to Broward County to the north, where Pembroke Pines is located. For three consecutive years, Pembroke Pines was listed in the World Almanac as one of the three fasting growing cities in the United States, Las Vegas and Jacksonville being the other two. Since then, Broward County has seen its share of hurricanes since these people moved here, now both Broward and Miami-Dade Counties are starting to see their populations dwindle, you couldn’t tell by the traffic In My Hometown…
…public streets are laid out in a grid with the east and west sides divided by Interstate 75. Gated communities are pretty much the order of the day, except where I live. There four square blocks resemble a real neighborhood. Single family homes are interspersed with several townhome developments. There are a couple of unobtrusive strip malls, two elementary schools, and a high school just one block removed. An expansive youth baseball facility, where there were once fifteen hundred kids (my son was one) signed up to play per season, rests at the northwest corner. Taft Street is a haven for speed traps. Once, traffic was so light that there was no need for such covert sentinels to fill the town coffers. You leisurely traveled from place to place without the thought of hold long it would take to get there. Then the surrounding housing boon hit, more traffic lights were added, teenage drivers leaving themselves approximately six minutes to get to school, funneled onto our formerly sedate little roadway at speeds nearing the speed limit on most major highways. Speed traps became the order of the day. At night, the bordering thoroughfares occasionally serve as DUI checkpoints. I know this because besides seeing them for myself, In My Hometown…
…this information is often published in the “Local” section of The Miami Herald, the newspaper to which my wife and I subscribe. Call us old-fashioned, but there’s something about having a physical newspaper delivered in the morning. Having your laptop while amid the morning sabbatical can be rather cumbersome, especially when stage one is complete, and its time to move on to stage two. However, a newspaper in the bather in the morning is downright American. Putting your feet up on the couch to read what you may have missed before you headed out for work, certainly has it over on sitting down the computer and staring at the screen. I’ve rarely heard of someone taking a nap in their computer chair while reading the news. Alas, the newspaper industry is on the outs. The paper that’s delivered every morning isn’t as wide as it once was, it’s thinner as well. It’s dropped off earlier, so often many items contained inside are literally yesterday’s news. Oh, and the way that it’s written!
Just last week, an item concerning the proliferation of Burmese pythons in the Everglades contained the following: “…the python that was captured during the hunt, was first euthanized, then killed.” This sentence got past the already thinned staff of proof-readers. It then got by the editor, and the typesetter, who probably doesn’t pay attention to that sort of thing. This example serves as a microcosm for what is happening in the newspaper industry around the country. Not only does this feed into my theory concerning the acceptance of mediocrity by today’s society, but also, the best writers have headed to the internet, and the decent ones that have stayed on are oblivious to their predicament.
Case in point, in this morning’s paper, there was an article about the propagation of videos fans are taking of sports celebrities. The writer, in his opinion, voiced his concern over this “new” wave of fishbowl living. Isn’t he aware that he contributed to this mess long ago? There are multiple sports radio stations, multiple sports television stations, multiple written sports forums, all vying to out-scoop the other. In doing so sports media probed, and then revealed the most obscure, “relevant” information. Now this writer is complaining that fans are doing the same. As far as I can tell, the sporting press opened up this can of worms. So starved for original content, one sportswriter resorted to plagiarizing my letter to the editor that the paper, in an effort to stay connected to its readership, never even acknowledged with a form letter response. Odd, how excerpts of what I wrote to the paper magically appeared in a column several weeks later almost verbatim. Nothing would make me happier than to write for The Miami Herald in the hope that what I contributed could somehow help stave off extinction, but they are running scared, and are doing so with the limited “talent” they have. At least I know that euthanize and killed are the same thing. Maybe they don’t know any better? They gave a huge amount of valuable op-ed space for a reprint of a Sarah Palin article, which it was obvious she didn’t write. Talk about grasping at straws to increase circulation…but maybe the Herald, once vibrant, is mirroring My Hometown…
…I betcha Bruce Springsteen never had to worry about crap like this in his hometown. Now, it seems as though in pursuit of efficiency, my hometown has become obsolete. The town has become a city with conflicting priorities and agendas. The city legislators are sitting on a track of land for which there were once great aspirations. Now it’s an albatross, a barren, soulless blight right in the center of its suburban sprawl. I don’t know how much longer I can, or want, to stay In My Hometown.