Suspended Reality

Sometimes you just gotta suspend reality.

Aaah, you figured it out: We went to the Council Meeting tonight (Monday).

Here’s the deal: the great County of Pasco has gotten into the fire and ambulance business bigtime, and in the process has begun to starve city fire departments. Better yet, the county has pointed to municipal borders and, in essence, told the City of Zephyrhills, "inside the city limits is your territory, outside is ours." The county has a right to do that.

But here’s where reality gets suspended.

The borders aren’t all that clean. One end of a street can be in the city, the other end in the county. Same street.

So let’s say you live in the county at 2201 Anystreet and I’m your neighbor at 2200 Anystreet, but the municipal border is between us, and I live in the City. Pay taxes there too.

As luck would have it we suffer heart attacks simultaneously

We both punch the last digit of 911 simultaneously in what could be our last moves.

The dispatcher notices that you are entitled to county ambulance service so she dispatches the nearest available county ambulance, which just happens to be one town away.

Another dispatcher notices that I live in the city where there just happen to be two ambulances waiting for a call. One of them is 10 blocks away, the other 20 blocks away. She sends me the closest one. The other remains in its stall.

My ambulance gets to me in about two minutes.

You ambulance has a much longer distance to travel. You die.

I live.

The second ambulance never moves.

And, it’s all about money and power.

How do you feel about that? Oops, sorry, you can’t answer ‘cause you’re dead.

Somehow, the folks we elect to run our cities and counties and even our nation seem to have lost sight of the fact that we, the taxpayers are their customers, not their servants.

They also seem to have lost any sense of honesty. You know, a man’s word is his bond; silly old fashioned stuff like that.

The interesting thing about this is that it didn’t used to be that way.

In this country we sort of instinctively did the right thing without even being asked.

Also at the council meeting was the latest city ordinance which closes all the city’s parks at 10 p.m.

This came about after complaints that there was rowdiness and drug dealing at the city’s Lincoln Park.

Councilperson Gina King wondered out loud why all the city’s residents should be penalized because of the actions of a few. She also wondered how closing a park at 10 would help the cops deal with the drug dealing since, to her recollection, drug dealing was illegal no matter the time of day.