I have to write this because it is a bit of sad news that might never reach any big media outlet. It’s about suburbia, and living here. Where I live, on a small island in the Florida peninsula, near Orlando, it’s nice and quiet. It’s not really an island but it IS secluded, one of those psuedo-private communities that have grown up over decades, where people come to escape the rat race and live life at a more leisurely pace.
We have a 15 mph speed limit here, which is necessary for single lane roads. Jan walks her dogs nearly every day and cars race past her at 35mph+, and these are some of the island’s inhabitants, large trucks for construction or deliveries, nearly everything you get on main roads. They ignore the speed limits. When she protested and asked one man to slow down her harangued her with curse words and threatened her dog’s life.
So she took action, and wrote an article for the island’s gazette, a newsletter for the inhabitants. She correctly pointed out that young children wander freely and play on or around the roads, as well as loose-running dogs (which are strictly illegal, since leash-laws SHOULD be in effect). The gazette’s editor agreed with her, because it IS dangerous and this is a place for families, not racing up and down the small roads.
This morning, someone had toilet-papered the editor’s front garden, a retaliatory action that might send a message to her to shut the hell up. Is this a backlash of little old ladies and families on the island, who want drag racing up and down their streets, or teenage children speeding in golf-carts? Doubtful, but it probably is a message from the one or two who feel that living here grants them the right to live as they please, to speed where they will, and to ignore the fact that their neighbors want that peaceful suburban life oh so dreamt of.