News in the 21st Century

It’s been on my mind for ages because unlike most people I recognize that I do it. I watch the news, I read it, just as I always have but I am more likely to read and watch the ones that I tend to agree with, I watch the extremes as well, Fox and MSNBC because I like to get both sides but the bottom line is that I have to remember that no matter which news Im watching I have to remember that it is heavily infused with opinions, sometimes it’s subtle sometimes it’s not.

For world news I watch Al Jazeera for US News I tend to prefer PBS. I admit I’m a Frontline and a NOVA junkie.

When it comes to porn there is no source outside the mainstream media. AVN and XBiz are exceedingly sloppy and the recent reporting on the demands for test results has really illustrated how bad and sloppy it is. I try to fill in the gaps but I have always said that I am not a journalist, I write my opinions.

As I think back in some very strange ways I have changed history, but not in the ways you think. Lets look at a recent example because it involved me I know about it, It makes me wonder how many times it has happened and gone unnoticed save for a very few.

The setting was Mexico Beach, Florida circa 2004. To understand you have to know that Mexico Beach was (and still is) about 20 years behind most Florida Beach towns. It was affordable and a small town with a city council that was bent on preserving its old fishing town charm, chain businesses didn’t get permits, the three hotels were all privately owned, there was no McDonalds or Burger King or even a Waffle House. To this day that is all still true.

Mexico Beach is and always has been a fishing community no matter what you do for a living, even if you are retired your life there is more than just “touched” by fishing. There are a few charter boats with names like Miss Mary, whose Captain “Cap’n Chip” is a life long resident, an honest guy, jovial and dedicated to making sure that his customers get their money’s worth, they catch fish and have fun doing it while leaving the safety in the hands of a capable Captain and Crew. But by far the most of the fisherman are people who own their own boats and pull them down to FL to put in at “the canal” the only entry to the Gulf Of Mexico between roughly Panama City to the west and Port St Joe to the east. Port Saint Joe is about 30 miles further….and means you have to go around the tip of Cape San Blas to hit open ocean into the gulf. That adds about 15 miles to your your day each way 3o miles total…most of todays center console boats get roughly 1.5 miles to the gallon….adding 30 miles adds about 20 gallons of gas to the tally each day with gas at even 2.50 a gallon back then thats a big hit and its also a big hit to the economy of Mexico Beach if people have to go to Port St Joe to get out into the gulf. Why ould they have to do that you ask?

The canal in Mexico Beach is a small not very wide and even less deep natural inlet, and as such sands can collect into the canal making the water too shallow to get in and out and it can happen overnight. The most common phone calls To Captain Chip from customers was is the canal open? If it wasn’t Chip couldn’t work that day.

Mexico Beach had a small dredge and the crew were diligent about clearing the canal every morning, as well as during the day in order to keep it passable. except during rough surf, which was common the canal was kept passable averaging maybe 2 days a week when nobody could get in or out…sometimes it would be fine for three weeks, then youd have a whole week when the dredge couldn’t keep up.

Now that you have some understanding of how important the canal was (and still is) you can understand the impact of what happened.

Kathy Kingsland was elected Mayor and her agenda, and it was an agenda, was to grow the town and like most small time, aspiring, politicians she had no clue how it would effect the citizens of her town. Keeping the canal open was not a priority for Mayor Kingsland, bringing in land developers was. The little dredge was working far more than it was designed to and soon it broke. Prior to Kathys election the town had asked the army corp of engineers for help and was told how to properly dredge and what to do to keep the canal from “sanding in” Kathy ignored it. When the dredge was replaced, a move she was dragging her feet on she purchased a dredge that was better suited for the mouth of the Mississippi River than for the tiny canal in Mexico Beach. The dredge couldn’t even be turned around in the canal, it was too big to dredge if the canal was sanded in too much.

Now imagine the impact of this on local businesses. The fishermen were going to Port St Joe, or staying home altogether. Captain Chip went weeks without being able to work, the gas stations that has tanks big enough to support hundreds of boats with fuel tanks that held 100 gallons or more were no longer selling the fuel that was their life blood. The hotels were empty and the restaurants no longer had waits, they didn’t even have enough customers…and this was the high season. The only other charter Captain actually moved his boat to Port St Joe.

Everyone in town was pissed….except the people working for the developers…New condo complexes were springing up like mushrooms after a rain and they were driving up property values drastically. Now you might think that is a good thing but most people who lived in Mexico Beach lived in homes they inherited and the only reason they could afford to live in a town whose primary industry is the service industry (waitresses, maintenance men, small store owners and clerks, bait stores, etc was because their expense was the property tax on their homes, and now thay had more than tripled and still rising.

I was living there for the summer, had my boat there and rented a house on the beach thing was I couldn’t get out of the canal.

I started a small forum called thedailydredge.com it was primarily abut fishing and it kept a daily canal status which on most days was “still closed”. I made a logo, printed up 6×9 color fliers and dropped them off in the local stores, they explained that among other things it had the status of the canal, local fishing reports, things to do in Mexico Beach for visitors and editorials, written at first by me, but I encouraged everyone to get in on the act. At the time the population was about 800 people in less than three weeks we had over 1200 active members on the forum, most of the population, including every city council member and a lot of property owners from Georgia and Alabama. In no time it became clear that the locals were fed up with “Mayor Kathy”

It started with a couple of city council members and it ended in “Mayor Kathy” resigning in what most people considered “disgrace”.  As it turned out she was playing somewhat fast and loose with the rules and while the Panama City Newspaper may not have run the story with anonymous sources and protected the whistle blowers The forum gave everyone a voice, and when word reached Tallahassee it got the attention of political oversight enforcement it all came crashing down on Mayor Kathy’s head.  And the head of the citizens.  You see in her zeal to issue zoning and building permits for these condo developers she didn’t get completion bonds, so when the bottom fell out of the real estate market right in the middle of possible indictments the developers abandoned the projects leaving Mexico Beach with a half dozen unfinished condo developments and nothing they could do about them.

If not for thedailydredge website, there’s no way to know what would have happened but nobody in the community who didn’t credit the dailydredge with Kathy’s demise.   Chip suggested I run for mayor, I wasn’t interested but his point was spot on, my name recognition was high in the community and everyone knew I was “in porn” but were totally OK with it because I didn’t bring that part of my life to Mexico Beach.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t take credit for Kathy’s demise that  was the citizens in action, all I did was to provide a place where those citizens could express their thoughts in a safe and politically neutral environment.  I gave them a safe haven to meet and form a response to the problem.  It didn’t get a lot of attention outside the small fishing community but within the community it was HIGHLY effective.  The next Mayor got it.  He was a forum member and a relatively active one.  He did what the corp of engineers suggested and changed the way they dredged, he purchased a dredge that was the right size for the job.  These days nobody ever asks “is the canal open” they know it is.  Since Mayor Kathy resigned ever mayor after her has understood the importance of the canal and I would bet that in total it has been closed less than a month in the ten years since and almost all of those the result of hurricanes.

It shows what can happen when the people, the community are given the resources to do the right thing for themselves.

If only it could work on a national scale.  If only we could use it to end the ridiculous war that has been a financial, civil liberty and moral sink hole for this country for the last forty years, the “war on drugs” and its blood and rights sucking cousin “the war on terrorism”

Someday, maybe it will