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Weather: Mostly cloudy. Highs in the upper 70s. Northwest winds 10 to 15 mph with gusts up to 25 mph. Saturday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the upper 50s. Northwest winds 5 to 10 mph.
Today at a Glance:
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
The City of Palm Coast Public Works Department hosts its Touch-a-Truck event, ‘Sky’s the Limit,’ from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. along Park Street in Central Park featuring more than 75 vehicles from multiple agencies including:
City of Palm Coast Public Works, Stormwater, Utility and Fire Departments;
Flagler County Fire Rescue;
Flagler County Sheriff’s Office;
East Flagler Mosquito Control District;
Florida Highway Patrol;
Florida National Guard;
NASCAR;
Angel Flight.
The event is Free and offers fun for the whole family – hosted by the City of Palm Coast Public Works Department, in celebration of National Public Works Week! The theme for National Public Works Week is #ConnectingtheWorldThruPublicWorks by joining forces with all of the important agencies doing work in Flagler County, it connects that unifying community spirit.
Gamble Jam: Musicians of all ages can bring instruments and chairs and join in the jam session, 2 to 5 p.m. . Program is free with park admission! Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area at Flagler Beach, 3100 S. Oceanshore Blvd., Flagler Beach, FL. Call the Ranger Station at (386) 517-2086 for more information. The Gamble Jam is a family-friendly event that occurs every second and fourth Saturday of the month. The park hosts this acoustic jam session at one of the pavilions along the river to honor the memory of James Gamble Rogers IV, the Florida folk musician who lost his life in 1991 while trying to rescue a swimmer in the rough surf.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
In Coming Days:
Flagler Pride Weekend is on June 10-11 in Palm Coast’s Central Park: All applications (Vendor, Sponsor, Volunteer, Speaker, Entertainment) for Flagler Pride Weekend are now open until midnight on May 20th, 2023. No late applications will be accepted or considered. Vendors, apply here. Flagler Pride weekend is scheduled for June 10-12, at Palm Coast’s Central Park.
Notably: Rachel Carson would be 107 today. She was not a saint in the Catholic sense of the term, but she was a saintly soul who made us see as we never could without her perceptions and prose Nabokov would envy. She died at 57 of cancer, creation’s irony: she had ended the reign of DDT and began the environmental movement with her Silent Spring, after producing lesser known but majestic works, especially the Sea Trilogy that, happily, the Library of America re-issued in a complete single volume, with the original illustrations, in 2022. As Hannah Gold wrote in The Nation, Carson refines her idea of the sea as a great drama full of alliances, clashes, and anxieties, every ounce of water a voiceless, teeming argument. “In the sea there are mysterious comings and goings, both in space and time: the movements of migratory species, the strange phenomenon of succession by which, in one and the same area, one species appears in profusion, flourishes for a time, and then dies out, only to have its place taken by another and then another, like actors in a pageant passing before our eyes.” This methodical striving often plays out behind curtains of sand, water, and darkness. “Invisibly, where the casual observer would say there is no life, it lies deep in the sand, in burrows and tubes and passageways.” Sea urchins are bound to their preferred tidal level by “invisible ties.” And when the day is done, “a dream world inhabited by creatures that move sluggishly or not at all…comes swiftly to life.” You will never tire of this book.
Now this:
Flagler Beach Webcam:
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
Nar-Anon Family Group
Flagler County Beekeepers Association Meeting
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
Palm Coast City Council Workshop
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club, at Flagler Beach Public Library
NAACP Flagler Branch General Membership Meeting
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years … the alienation from the sources of our strength.”
–From Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder (1955).
Ray W. says
Over 40 years ago, one of my professors offered the explanation that children see the world through eyes clouded by very few coping mechanisms. As we age, it was explained, we develop more and more coping mechanisms, which layer over that simplistic, childlike view of the world. Some of these coping mechanisms further cloud our ability to clearly see the world. Others aid or enhance our capacities. He further spoke of our ability to revert to that clearer, more childlike form of sight, often occurring when we engage in habitual activities such as bathing, learned in early childhood. When we enter a shower or bathtub, we revert in our thoughts to that more childlike state. The phrase “privy counselor”, used for centuries to describe the role of certain royal advisors, to the professor, meant that the most important of the king’s advisors were allowed into the king’s most private reserves, to advise the king when he was thinking differently from the way he thought in other much more public venues.
If these professorial observations accurately portray the human condition, it may be that each person’s set of coping mechanisms allows us all to see the world differently. Some people cope by adopting obedient and deferential attitudes to kings, presidents, tyrants, radio talk show hosts, television commentators, political partisans, etc., believing what these people say not because it is accurate, truthful or best, but because it has become the easiest way for such people to make sense of this ever-conflicted world.
Others cope by pursuing God’s gift of reason, as our founding fathers phrased it, enhanced by the exercise of intellectual rigor.
Does this offer one perspective of why Alexander Hamilton posed this most serious of questions? “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election on the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”
To many of our founding fathers, “accident” meant accident of leadership by royal birth order. “Force” meant leadership by tyrants, autocrats, brute force. Neither involved reason and choice.
Laurel says
Then Trump would be an “accident” and DeSantis would be “Force.” Neither person involves reason and choice, once in control. They certainly don’t involve much intellectual rigor, from them or their cults.
Ever notice how people often get stuck at a particular age in their lives?
Ray W. says
Thank you, Laurel.
Our founding fathers, ever students of human nature, thought themselves unique among all other and former societies of men (and women). They knew that all previous efforts at democracy had failed. They thought the fatal flaw was within all human societies, that human beings just might always choose obedience to kings over freedom, obedience to tyrants over freedom, obedience to force over freedom.
Just maybe, at their moment in time, enough people had become sufficiently educated in the forms of thought that we now call western rational thought to sustain their experimental proposal of constitutional government. It wasn’t that constitutions hadn’t been tried before; it was this unique collection of compromises contained in the newly published Constitution written by James Madison that formed the basis of their hope.
It should be remembered that Burke had addressed Parliament during the debates on the passage of the Stamp Act to warn the members of the consequences of passing the Act. Burke informed Parlaiment that he knew a great number of book sellers in London. He told Parliament that these book sellers sold more books to colonists than they sold to all the peoples of England and that the colonists ordered a significant number of books on law and government.
The framers of our Constitution were highly educated in the style of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hamilton, who posed the great question, hoped enough educated people existed throughout the fledgling nation to see and understand the importance of reason and choice. But if too few existed, we, too, would remain obedient to accident and force.
When Franklin retorted to a question that we had a republic, if we could only keep it, he was commenting on the great likelihood that men (and women) would revert to the universal human tendency to obedience to kings and tyrants that had for so long infected human existence.
This is why I focus on Jimbo99 so often; he displays independent thought based on reason and choice, but he so easily slips back into obedience to kings and tyrants. Dennis C. Rathsam just cannot break free of his obvious desire for tyranny. He displays that form of thought that Madison, in Federalist Paper #37, defined as “pestilential.”
Pestilential partisan members of faction were the greatest threat to the proposed liberal democratic Constitutional republic, then and now. Checks and balances were inserted for every power gifted by the people to the Constitution. No one person was ever to be delegated unlimited power for an indeterminate period of time. The three branches of government meant that there were to be two checks and balances to every granted power. Each branch was designed to zealously preserve its delegated powers and zealously oppose every other branch’s exercise of delegated power. Separation of powers meant that Congress was never supposed to be obedient to the executive.
This was the founding idea of the conservative movement, when Parliament stood up to King James II. The king has his powers. Parliament had a different set of powers. The king would never again intrude on Parliament’s powers. Conservatism is one of the cornerstones of the proposed Constitution that we ratified so long ago. Conservatism was liberalism; it was freedom, it was individual rights, it was the rule of law. Now, those obedient to mob rule call for beheading Democrats, and not one so-called conservative decries the proposal to murder.
The question has never left us, has never changed. Are we forever destined to rule by accident or force? There will always be budding kings, budding tyrants, budding autocrats. They will always seek power. They will always use pathos as a form of persuasion. If enough people are persuaded to fear something, someone, anything, anyone, they will band together behind anyone they perceive as strong. Our liberal democratic Constitutional republic has always been close to failure.
This was the warning Melancton Smith prophesied when he wrote during the debates over adopting the proposed Constitution. Smith wrote that the middling class, the working class, did not easily form associations. He wrote that four classes of men (and women) easily formed associations: the law class, the military class, the merchant class, and the wealthy class. Smith warned that the language of the proposed Constitution would not protect us if a member of one of the four classes ever learned how to speak to the working class in a way to bind them together. Smith thought that such a populist leader could come from any of the four classes, but he wrote that such a leader would most likely belong to the wealthy class, and that such a wealthy leader would likely be a “demagogue” who was “destitute of principal.” To Smith, this possibility was a flaw sufficient to vote against the proposed Constitution, that we would eventually do ourselves in by the very language contained in our own Constitution.
Laurel says
Ray W.: Well, Smith may have been right, but I hang onto hope.
Not being a religious person, I often got into religious conversations trying to figure out what the hold was. One young man admitted to me that he would rather have something tell him what to do, than have him figure it out himself and Catholicism did that for him. A security blanket. People congregate, whether for work, spiritualism or recreation, for security purposes.
Trump, is the “accident” by being born into great wealth and great wealth was handed to him. He feels he is somehow entitled to do whatever he pleases and get away with it. So far, that’s true. He has found his middle class and talks to their fears of being replaced and to their believed white male victim-hood. They see him as talking their language. What I see is him talking down to them. They superimpose him on Old Glory with the body, dressing and revenge of Rambo. A superhero to save the day. A comfort zone they can get together and discuss at the water cooler while giving each other high fives. Agreement, and therefore, security.
DeSantis, being the “force,” has reached the same crowd with somewhat different fears for them. There is that God fearing religious factor, but instead of completely relying on the replacement theory, he is working at erasing what the makes people uncomfortable, which is what the middle class does not understand such as gay people and trans people. So, he signs legislature at night, does not talk to the press unless they are entirely friendly to him and changes wordings via “newspeak.” He takes on the largest employer in the world, books and librarians for no other reason than straight, white discomfort, and pretends to be Top Gun.
Though DeSantis is infiltrating through local governments for his support, I do not believe the “force” is with him. Both men are focused on authoritarianism, and both men are bullies that will try to out bully each other, and the truth. Though I am shocked at the amount of support these men get, I still hold out for hope that our fellow Americans will not allow them to succeed much further. We’ll see if Smith was right, or just really close.
Joe D says
Laurel:
You are absolutely correct about people getting “stuck” in a life stage.
As a child and family Nurse Therapist for 10 years, you see many ADULTS who ( usually due to neglect/trauma/loss/extreme poverty) get stuck on the road to mature ADULT development.
Some get stuck in the early “trust/mistrust “ stage of infants and toddlers who have been neglected or abused and have not developed a strong LOVING attachment to a dependable nurturing adult caretaker. That mistrust sabotages development and maintaining friendships and partnership relationships throughout adulthood.
Around age 10-12, parents and adults previously seen by the child, as all knowing and all powerful start to be looked upon as frail, undependable and foul able. This is the stage that children realize that parents (and teachers, etc) aren’t PERFECT….that they are in reality just HUMAN
The adolescent stage (which most parents DREAD) is when the child has decided that ADULTS know NOTHING about life, and feel they should be left alone to do what they please. Surviving THIS stage for both parents and teens requires a parent to be able to set REASONABLE guidelines for their teen ( you cannot be your child’s FRIEND…they are going to have LOTS of friends….you have to be their PARENT, which frequently means being “the BAD guy,” and saying “NO”), while at the same time GRADUALLY letting the parental controls loosen in slowly increasing independence, to allow the teen to begin making appropriate ( or not) decisions, in small areas, before age 18 when parents lose total LEGAL control over what their child does ( meaning allowing your child to “fail” in small things, so they get experience in EVENTUALLY making the “right” decisions).
If families survive to the NEXT stage, your “child” has developed enough confidence (from parental support and encouragement and gradually released limits) to become an independent, functioning adult.
Due to traumatic life events (parental neglect, abuse, mental illness, drug and alcohol misuse, divorce, parental death/extreme poverty) any person can get stuck and sidelined on the road to independent adulthood.
As a counselor/therapist, my job was to have the client go back over the most important memories from growing up, (both positive and negative), to assist them in figuring out at what stage they got “stuck”….frequently just the knowledge that the event WAS traumatic, and NOT THEIR fault, can help them move on to the next stage. Even as ADULTS, you can’t “skip” stages….each one is important to mature adult development.
Even looking back at the upbringings of some of our COMMUNITY leaders, you can start to get an idea of WHERE their stage of emotional development STOPPED….unfortunately, for someone to get past that stage, the person needs to admit there is a problem, and their current methods of dealing with it are not working.
Sadly for SOME people (even Governors and Presidents),they NEVER resolve those issues, and die, sadly still STUCK!
Sherry says
Good Sunday Morning, Joe D!
Thank you so much for the excellent explanation of “getting stuck” at a particular stage of emotional development. It certainly seems to apply to “even Governors and Presidents”, as you so aptly pointed out.
With this new understanding, I can now clearly see that stunted emotional development in the Congressional members/School Board members, et al, who so stubbornly assert their extreme ideologies. . . along with their passionate, close minded followers.
All the more reason to learn absolutely everything we can about each and every candidate for office before we vote. “Character” matters!
On a very personal level, I now have a new level of understanding of the perspective of my own tragically drug addicted sister.
Thank you so very much Joe D!
Laurel says
Joe D: This being stuck at a certain age becomes more visible, to me anyway, as people get older. I think I expect more from senior adults, but often see another person show through when they are presented with particular problems.
DeSantis is easy. He’s stuck in the “terrible twos.” He is somewhere between there, and around four. If someone says something he doesn’t like, his eyes fly open, he tosses his head around, tantrums and blames others. I expect him to threaten to tattle on someone and get even with what he perceives as not in his direct favor.
Trump is stuck at an older age. He reminds me of Darth Vadar when he took off his helmet and exposed the unfinished man. I see Trump as the mean, bully kid, around ten-ish, who would put a tack on your seat, and pretend nothing’s there while he snickers about how he got you. So somewhere around, but not yet, adolescence. He cannot tolerate any form of criticism, yet highly enjoys name calling as if sticks and stones and words can really hurt.