Yesterday’s trip was supposed to be a short hop around the city of Tampa, landing me in a community with a bay, beaches, boats and interesting things.  It was true, it was a short drive of about 140 miles, but it was not a short time.  I took a loop around Tampa in hopes of taking the faster route by avoiding the traffic of the city.  My GPS agreed with me that the loop was the fastest.  However, I missed the fact that while this route is a large four to six lane highway, it is liberally sprinkled with slow acting stop lights.  That made for a slow drive, averaging around 20 mph.  Once again, my short day expanded to several hours more than anticipated.

When I finally arrived in the Port Charlotte I found a place that is still pretty battered up from the last hurricanes.  Blue plastic roofs are common, as well as wide spread damage to various structures.  Many, perhaps most, street signs are missing so it is difficult to know what street you are on, and therefore difficult to navigate.  Luckily my GPS knows most of the street names. Otherwise I would be lost.  My GPS took me to the wrong town, sort of.  The hotel web site gave the address as being in Port Charlotte.  When I got there I was in front of an empty lot.  I drove to a similar address in Punta Gorda – that got me to an ACE hardware store about six miles away.  It turned out that the hotel was sort of behind the ACE store.  It is a normal, ho hum sort of hotel – but quite a bit more expensive than what I had been choosing.  The advertisements appeared to show a lounge and dining area.  I hoped for a little relaxation and food in the hotel.  That wasn’t to be – I had to seek out entertainment and food someplace other than in the neighborhood of the hotel. 

My thought was that since I am very near the gulf and a large bay it should be easy to find a “marina” sort of place with boats, docks, a view and hopefully an interesting place to eat.  I drove for an hour or so looking for such a place. According to my GPS I was getting very close to the water at times.  I couldn’t find a view of the water; much less find any place to enjoy it.  I did find a lot of gated communities built on the water front.  I found groups of huge five story condos – I suppose housing all those old folks from up north that we hear about. I found many lower middle class style subdivisions. There must be water near by because I saw a lot of huge, very expensive boats sitting around. I couldn’t find anything that looked like a town or community.  Once again all I could find were large shopping centers with huge parking lots.  I finally settled on an Applebees that I spotted in one of the shopping centers.  Luckily I had a GPS, otherwise I don’t know how I would have found my way back to the hotel.

While driving around looking at the shopping centers, stopped at the many stop lights, I got to thinking about how the shopping areas have changed over the years.  The first challenges to “down town America” were the small strip malls with parking more or less in front of each store front.  These strip malls were usually one continuous building with store fronts facing outward, accessible from the parking lot.  A street would often have several of these little malls. You moved your car from store to store.  Then there was a flurry of enclosed malls – like The Great Mall of America.  These had huge parking lots, but no stores directly accessible from the outside. Access was from the inside where the stores fronted a large open pedestrian space.  These were interesting in that they got a lot of people in close contact with each other as they milled about going from store to store.  While they were in the vicinity of others, nobody actually talked or socialized with anyone other than those in their immediate shopping group or the store clerks.  Now the malls have changed again, they are big parking lots opening onto many very large individual almost “stand alone” stores. The stores are often large department stores such as Target, or large specialty stores for classes of merchandise such as hunting, athletic equipment or perhaps shoes.

While the layout has changed, as has the size of each store, the one common element is a total lack of community.  Nobody talks to each other, nobody exchanges pleasantries – nothing.  The big enclosed malls at least offered an good bit of “people watching,” but the new style managed to eliminate that activity because there is no “milling around” and no place to sit and watch the flow of people.  It is all very business-like, but not human-like.

At one of the many stop light breaks I happened to be stopped next to an interesting pickup.  The first thing that caught my attention was the giant American flag sticking up from the bed of the pickup – waving proudly as he drove down the street.  It is surprising that it survives being hauled around like that.  Then I got to see the many signs plastered on all sides of the truck.  There were lots of signs cheering Trump, and signs with nasty Democrat bashing.  Most of them were extremely aggressive, what I considered to be verbal bullying. This was a person that apparently feels it not only necessary to indiscriminately insult people, but felt comfortable and entitled in doing so.  What became obvious to me was that the far right group relish pushing people around, they like the feeling of being threatening and bullying, they like the feeling of power.  You would never see a display like that from the “left” – they are far too polite for that, they don’t see it necessary to aggressively push their views onto others.  They have an entirely different way to go through the world.  My guess is that a lot of the folks that flaunt their power and imagined anger are also members of groups such as the KKK.  

I don’t think these people are actually angry, and I doubt that they actually have any special grievances.  I think that they are just bullies, and the politics of today allow them to express that freely in public and anywhere they see fit.  I am not sure what creates bullies, there were several in my high school. I am sure they exist in high schools today.  I used to think they eventually grew out of it, but perhaps I was wrong – maybe they just learn to hide it because of all the trouble it gets them into (or because they are in prison).  Now days perhaps the cloak has been pulled back off, now they can proudly proclaim their personal power.  Their aggression is an odd thing, and frankly scary as hell because it is so irrational.  There is no “reason” behind what they do, there is just power.  You can run into it at any time and there is no way of rationally reducing the threat, they don’t want to reduce it and they don’t want to think about anything.  They want to push people around, they seem to want to destroy America, and don’t really care at all what comes out of that – they don’t want to fix things; they just want to crush them.   

I am finding a lot of fear here, almost certainly because there is a lot of unchecked aggression.  Aggressive people have taken control.  It is a constant experience in the south, you can’t get away from it. As I think back on the posts that I have made on this trip a couple of things stand out.  One is the lack of “community” created by the design of the highways and stores, and the other is the amount of open aggression all around me.  I wonder how interconnected these might be.  Are we creating an aggressive population by the way we design shopping centers and highways?  If so, what is going to be the legacy of online shopping where even the tiny hint of community vanishes?  Should we perhaps be recognizing the danger and start spending more time on designing community-building infrastructure rather than wealth-accumulating infrastructure? I mention the wealth aspect because all of the decisions about the design of the infrastructure are based upon reducing price and increasing profits.  Since there are almost no more “mom and pop” businesses, all of the profits go to the large corporations and a few of their shareholders.