Sheldon Greene

OUR LIVES #2 – Finding Eldorado in Florida

Recently I sang in the Oakland East Bay Orchestra performance of Bernstein’s Candide; a lyrical operetta based on Voltaire’s satirical novel. Among Candide’s travels is a stay in a utopian Eldorado, a place were “people live in peace and die of age”. With the words and music still redounding in my head I flew to Orlando for a business meeting at the Disney EPCOT Center, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Wind Energy Association. I confess that since Gore v. Bush I have held little regard for Florida, a humid place peopled with self-indulgent retirees who can’t read a ballot, shallow parvenus, and revanchist refugees. (Not fair, I know but fun all the same).

It had twice been to California’s Disneyland and had been moderately impressed by the scale of implementation of Walt Disney’s grand vision. Of course my preference is for real nature rather than a Vegas style replica. Even so. EPCOT stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. I had forgotten this. While much of Disney’s vision is unfulfilled, in other respects the place exceeds it. At the Airport you get a taste of Disney’s obsession with order. Your arrival and departure from your hotel are logged and overseen. Disney World itself is apparently twenty-four square miles of development pods, theme-based exhibitions linked by fastidiously maintained roads, set in a dense forested green belt, interspersed with ponds and lakes. The resort, the Coronado Springs, was a chain of low-rise buildings around a lake. Staff was ubiquitous, friendly and helpful from the moment you stepped off the bus. Unlike the Walmart model in which workers get low wages that are subsidized by federal assistance, according to one of them, their income was sufficient to have a middle class lifestyle, including health insurance with dental care and a pension. Disney just got negative press attention for outsourcing some of their tech jobs and displacing domestic workers. In response, they claim that the money saved resulted in a net gain for American workers and they are currently employing 74,000 Americans in the Orlando area. There seems to be a real emphasis on quality and authenticity. A Bay Area food snob, I was prepared to be dismissive but my first dinner was authentic, Mexican cuisine. The next morning’s fast-food style breakfast was cheap, abundant and flavorful; notches above standard hotel fare. The event that I attended was at the Mexican pavilion, one of eleven national centers that expose visitors to the culture, architecture, folklore, and society of the theme country. I drank mescal with a subtle tomato based chaser in an intimate bar, passed through the indoor market and took a boat ride through the history of Mexico punctuated by videos of Disney characters. After dark we stood on a terrace on the edge of the lake looking across at the silhouette of other buildings and saw choreographic fireworks synchronized with stirring movie music. Effulgent fire gave birth to a rotating world with visible continents filled with images of landscape, animals, and people. A week or so later the NYT had an article about another Floridian’s small-scale utopian project . Harris Rosen, the son of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants built a motel chain from scratch. Living modestly, he endowed a mostly poor, black Florida town with funds for pre-school and scholarships to state universities for every high school graduate. His simple prescription; give people hope. The result? Academic performance soared, crime plummeted, school drop outs evaporated. Nearly all of the high school graduates are going to college. Now back in Berkeley I’ve been thinking about these two very different personal visions and the impact of their execution on our society. What do they have in common? 1) A concept that had a positive impact on people and made a part of the world a better place. 2) The willingness to spend the money to pursue and achieve a long-term pre-determined goal, one that might take decades to fulfill. What can we take from these disparate but connected efforts? Social and economic problems, even if impacted and pernicious, can be mitigated. It takes vision, the willingness to try, and the tenacity to see it through.

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Sheldon Greene

Sheldon Greene started young. He is the author of eight well received novels as well as articles published in scholarly journals.

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Phone: 510 325 0233           |           Email: sheldon.greene7@gmail.com

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Email: sheldon.greene7@gmail.com

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