“You can’t go home again” -, well you can’t really go anywhere as it once was. Older folks are often wrapped in nostalgia. As one of them, I remember many places I was privileged to visit before great change. Often merely modernity, sometimes catastrophe. Sanibel Island was one of them .
When my wife and I visited years ago it was – like many places we went – caught between old and new. The new was glitchy, shiny, and inaccessably privatized. The old had a patina of history along with the comfort of the commonplace.
Hurricane Ian exchanged all that, of course. New things are being rebuilt, but all is shiny, private, glitz. I find myself never wanting to revisit anywhere that once charmed me .
This culture is, I think, testing the proposition that private wealth is always better than public for anything but the most utilitarian needs. Mostly gaudy and ugly, but above all else tightly secreted away. With rare exceptions, America has no grand public spaces, and even fewer that are not merely an attempt at preserved wilderness .
It’s a forward-looking time. Ignoring real history in favor of myth, and ignoring the present in the race to the next great thing .
Sometimes an old man believes all the great things are gone with the wind .
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 