Florida is the next Atlantis, why are Floridians so blasé about it?

I’m eccentric.  I’m sure anyone could pull out the DSM and come up with a few guesses as to why I’ve been weird my whole life.  I like it a lot but it bothers the people around me that I have trouble focusing on normal things like traffic patterns and the news.  I’m sure it’s because my brain is 90% focused on existential problems that neuro-typical people block with ease. I can’t seem to turn it off and that’s fine because the news is boring A.F. I don’t know what my loved ones get out of the evening news. It rarely impacts them.  I would watch with them if it included stories about how much serious property damage we incur every single time it rains. More and more, Florida floods whithout rain, just because the tide comes in on a full moon.  Maybe it’s the heat.  They’re so busy beating the heat and humidity that they don’t care that a full moon now means inevitable property damage.  Painfully long commutes are made worse because the streets are covered in water, stalling some of their cars.  I don’t understand how they have time to think about burning buildings and a couple robberies when they are drowning.  I can’t watch the news because my brain won’t let me forget that we’re drowning and there are no solutions.  Places like NYC and Amsterdam are built on solid rock so they can build sea walls.  South Florida is a porous limestone. Sea level rise can’t be blocked by gating of our cities because the water is coming up from underneath us.  Our water table is only four feet beneath our feet (I’ll tell you how our local politicians convinced us to turn that fresh water source into a trash collection site another time). When the tide comes in on a full moon and it rains, people who live miles from the beach are also seeing their backyards and streets flood.  Just another day in Florida.

I only know one person who sees it everyday. My dad. But he isn’t talking about it with people. He kind of just calmly observes humanity behaving the way he expects - no quick fix, so ignore it. I obsess about solutions. The problem is always percolating in the back of my mind: Florida is the next Atlantis. 

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