Conexión Miami / Santos, the conversationalist
President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia talked with some in Miami’s Colombian community. He conversed for political reasons, of course.
But, despite charges that his government is guilty of Castro-Chavism, communism, and surrendering to the FARC, he said that his country will not steer away from its economic model or — pay attention — from its quest for peace.
And that, he says, is because peace is not his property or his government’s “but the property of all Colombians, inside and outside the national territory.”
Santos went further. He said that the fact that the Colombian soccer team at the recent World Cup won the Fair Play Award was “a divine condition, because it really represents what Colombia wants to be.”
Good for Santos, a president who doesn’t mix hope and reality. Makes people recall the toll of 8 people killed during the “festivities” after the first game in the Group Stage. Could it have been the Greeks?
In the name of Cohen
Governor Rick Scott of Florida signed a law that extends to four years the minimum sentence for any driver who leaves the scene of an accident that took human lives.
The law bears the name of Aaron Cohen, who died at 37 after driver Michele Traverso struck him and fled in 2012. At the time, Traverso served less than a year in prison.
It is said that punishment neither heals wounds nor rights a wrong, but Scott seems to think otherwise and has signed that bill, perhaps in an effort to reduce the figure of three people killed every week in Florida by irresponsible drivers.
Raising a standard
The American Dream is possible in Ocala. Appalled by the bad taste shown for decades — even after the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Paris guillotines — the city’s authorities decided to fine any person who drags his trousers on the floor, i.e., those who wear them more than 2 inches below the waist.
I suppose his intention is obvious: nobody will want to pay $500 to indulge in such fashion statements. The ordinance was published last week; it forbids the display of “part of the underwear and the bare buttocks.”
A ghost hovers over the border
Somehow, the veil has fallen from Obama’s face (the image is not exact but is useful enough). I say so because the White House has been insisting on one word: deporting. Although basically, as you know better than I, that’s nothing new.
Deportations are the rule in the Obama era, when, judging strictly by the facts, more people have been deported than in any previous administration. So, reprising the idea, I said that Obama’s face has been unveiled.
His spokesmen return to the same issue, over and again, about how busy everyone is in Washington dealing with the influx of undocumented immigrants, so they can be deported as soon as possible.
That is why you and I, born observers, sensitive enough to feel other people’s pain, understood immigrant boy Julio Pérez when, standing outside the Krome Detention Center in Miami on Wednesday, he asked that his father not be deported. The photograph is everywhere. You can Google it.
‘To them, I am Momma,’ Janice says
In Orlando, Fla., Janice Haley keeps two Bengal tigers in her yard. She pets them, feeds them, allows a trainer to teach them tricks, has fun with them, lies down with them, embraces them, delicately holds their front paws — which look like made of felt — and rubs them with visible tenderness.
Haley smiles. Haley explains. Night falls. Haley locks the cage and says “I’ll see you in the morning.” I get goose bumps.
