Florida’s young hit the bars, get even

The young emerged from quarantine with a vengeance. I do mean vengeance.

They returned to their favorite haunts, barefaced and thick as barflies, as if social distancing had been a passing fad, the 2020 equivalent of Gangnam Style or the Harlem Shake.

They became so blatant in their disregard for coronavirus safety measures that Ron DeSantis, the governor who had vowed he wouldn’t, closed Florida bars for at least another 30 days.

Halsey Beshears, head of the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, explained the obvious: “During the month of June 2020, the number of individuals testing positive for COVID-19 increased significantly in the state of Florida, especially among younger individuals.”

Unhappily, the consequences of youthful recklessness fall on us elders. We know that the stunning surge of COVID infections (a single-day record 10,109 new cases were reported Thursday) means months more of house arrest. Or maybe the morgue.

The young (34 and under) accounted for

48% of the nearly 50,000 new infections Florida recorded in the last week of June. The over-65 set represented just 10% of new cases, but that’s the demographic most at risk

(52% of Florida’s known coronavirus fatalities.)

Young partiers (along with the thousands of Black Lives Matter street protesters) are blamed for daunting outbreaks in the sunbelt states, particularly Texas, Arizona and Florida. “Congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news,” a frustrated Dr. Anthony Fauci told a U.S. Senate committee last week. “We really got to stop that right now.”

Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned once again that while the young often suffer no apparent effects of a disease contracted while bar hopping, they’re likely to become asymptomatic carriers. So much for their grannies.

Normally, this would be where I describe Gen X, Gen Y, centennials, millennials — the whole damn bunch — as downright selfish. Except, my generation has earned exclusive rights to the term.

We deserve their revenge.

Even as the coronavirus rages, the other great existential crisis — the one sustained by boomer negligence — has continued to fester.

During the last week of June, as it became obvious that Florida was becoming a coronavirus hotspot, South Florida was simultaneously beset with recording-breaking indications of climate change.

Hotspot indeed. We endured the hottest week of the hottest month in South Florida history. Which broke a record set way back in the summer of 2019.

On Monday, South Florida thermometers reached 98 degrees, a record for a June day and the second highest temperature ever recorded hereabouts.

Meteorologists are now predicting that the world is in the midst of the hottest July ever. NOAA calculates that there’s a 75 percent chance 2020 will be the hottest year ever. This follows the hottest decade on record.

On June 26, a day when Floridians were preoccupied by the prospect of 8,942 new

COVID-19 infections, they probably didn’t notice a news item warning that the state’s major insurers were jacking up the cost of windstorm premiums by 33 percent.

Boomer politicians, the same gang that downplayed the coronavirus threat, have long pretended that climate change was an inconvenient myth. Except, the insurance industry, faced with the increased likelihood of catastrophic storms and floods that comes with global warming, can no longer afford to play along.

On Monday, a day when Florida recorded

6,563 new infections, we also learned that the federal flood insurance modeling system has failed to include six million properties, many in Florida, that are newly threatened by encroaching seas.

Back on June 21, a day when the total number of coronavirus infections in Florida exceeded 100,000, most of us were probably too preoccupied to notice that the temperature in Verkhoyansk, Siberia, 400 miles further north than Anchorage, Alaska, reached 100 degrees,

10 degrees warmer than South Florida that same day. Before global warming, Verkhoyansk had been famous for recording the Northern Hemisphere’s coldest temperature — 90 below — in 1892.

Temperature spikes in the arctic translate into melting glaciers and ice caps, rising seas and Florida floods. Of course, we boomers have allowed the problem to fester for a generation, but who cares? We’ll be dead and gone before South Florida’s inundated.

We’ve artfully left the sacrifices necessary to remedy global warming to our progeny. Boomers and the politicians we’ve elected have been utterly brilliant at the art of denial.

And now, so too are our kids, at least when it comes to that other crisis. If old men mutter that there’s no climate crisis, the young, beers in hand, have a ready reply: “Pandemic? What pandemic?”

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or @grimm_fred