I had to attend a conference in St. Petersburg this week with a couple of colleagues, and we took one of the college’s awesome 4-Runners for the trip.
Normally, when I’m driving my own tiny car down the highway, I avoid the outside lane.
I have a completely unwarranted and frankly weird premonition that I’ll be flying along the big bridge between Tampa and St. Pete — with The Clash or something similar blasting from my monster speakers, all out of proportion to the car’s size (the volume breaks through the fitful connections that still only partly function after decades of abuse) — when a giant Wal-Mart semi, head down and crashing towards the beach outlets, blows me off the span and out into the bay.
But in this huge six-ton touring SUV, I chance it and take the outer lane and gamble a glance into the water below. One travel partner catches it first — “What the heck is that?” (He’s new from Nebraska and not yet familiar with our flora and fauna). “Fish!” My other companion has spotted the huge pod of dolphins, slicing through the glasslike surface of the water like knives.
Ten seconds later, we spot another pod — this time on the horizon on the other side, flowing smoothly through the mirrored sea, surrounded by a flock of pelicans, intent on sharing whatever the dolphins are fishing for in these waters.
Florida surprises you. Another few minutes and we would have missed it. Sometimes it’s just like that here.
The Legislature has been aptly and roundly criticized as one of the most dysfunctional collections of jackasses to stumble into the Statehouse in recent memory. They battle each other, the governor and their own constituents; they can’t agree on where to grab their next lattes, much less coalesce around anything as complex as a budget, and the things they wrangle over sometimes challenge the dimmest minds.
But this past week, a shining moment briefly eclipsed, for me anyway, all that had gone before.
The Florida Senate voted, in bipartisan unanimity, to do the right thing. Together, without fuss, without real battle, and without ballyhoo. What they propose, with the support of the House and the scribbled approval of our governor, could be an actuality in months.
SB 472 passed 37-0. It was a bill to remove the statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith from the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and replace it with the visage of Florida’s own Mary McLeod Bethune — a civil rights leader, a founder of Bethune-Cookman University, and an advocate of the registration of African American voters during one of the most difficult times in Florida’s history.
Smith’s statue will be returned to Florida, where it can add to the living history of the state (Sen. Dennis Baxley of Ocala has taken charge of finding the statue an appropriate new home).
I suspect that Gen. Smith will be happier here, given the history; he was a citizen in rebellion against those who occupied those halls in 1861, and surely would have been puzzled by having his likeness staged there. That war is long, long over, and he can rest nearer home.
Bethune, however, richly deserves her likely new status as a representative of all that is good in this state: the righting of long-term wrongs, the equality of her citizens; the celebration of diversity and the strength of a wonderfully lavish culture. She represents the Florida of our hopes, of our aspirations; she is someone we can all look up to, and across to, but never again down upon.
There is a wonderful synchronicity at work.
The Legislature is incredibly troublesome to those of us who love political order, because of the very things that Bethune and the other dreamers and doers represent: we do not always agree; we do not concur on sometimes even basic ideas; Floridians, like most Americans, are contentious, competitive, quarrelsome, but right-minded truth-seekers.
Then suddenly, splashing above the melee, a great idea breaks loose, scattering all the little bait fish before it.
The Florida Senate has done a fine thing. We can hope that the rest of the gears and levers of government will creak forward, albeit rustily, and make this proposition a reality.
R. Bruce Anderson (randerson2@flsouthern.edu) is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics at Florida Southern College in Lakeland.