By Tom Madden
No, this is not the lead-in that I originally wrote to my story about Lauderdale-by-the-Sea Commission’s decision not to hire lifeguards.
As a former lifeguard myself who just wrote the book Planetary Lifeguard, Blowing the Whistle on Climate Change, it upset me how a preponderance of residents and businesses there prefer to leave their beaches unprotected.
What caused this rewrite late last night was the shocking attempted assassination of our former President Trump at a political rally in rural Pennsylvania that suddenly turned horrendously bloody.
Crackling and whizzing gunfire sounds during Trump’s speech turned it into a horribly grotesque event, a slap in the face of our democracy when a bullet came within an inch of possibly murdering the former President.
For me and I’m sure for millions of others it put a whole new meaning on the importance of something that today suddenly seems more necessary than ever in a society that has become so roughly unsettled, so mean and so violent.
I’m referring now to something vitally important–security. Security at all levels.
From the Secret Service protecting our leaders down to the Lifeguards on our beaches watching out for our children, some destined to be our future leaders, this event may have shaken us all into thinking differently today about security.
Certainly, the security of our Nation’s leaders, the process our diligent Secret Service so expertly deploys in protecting and saving their lives, is more pertinent, so essential and far broader an issue today than lifeguards looking out for bathers.
The importance of lifeguards was my original purpose in writing this, but now seems trivial in comparison, and only a tiny part of a much larger, now bloodier, more traumatic picture.
On the other hand, security starts where? At home! It starts with protecting our families and reaches all the way up to protecting our Presidents and those running for the highest offices.
This is why the character I created, my Planetary Lifeguard, gave three cheers to Lauderdale-by-the-Sea Commissioner Theo Poulopoulos for trying to hire lifeguards. And booed citizens who told him to take a hike on that beach they felt he’s so gung-ho about protecting.
Poulopoulos wanted to put lifeguards on duty saving swimmers more apt than ever to get caught in rip tides, dangerous currents so prevalent today with all the devious oceanic effects of climate change and now with monstrous hurricanes on the horizon.
But a preliminary plan to conduct a study on how many lifeguards the town needs and what it would cost was dropped after results of a city survey showed a preponderance of residents and businesses were against hiring lifeguards. This was despite the fact that last February 20, a little girl died in an accident in the sand there and shortly afterward two men died from possible drownings.
Elected officials have repeatedly discussed beach safety since 7-year-old Sloan Mattingly died when she and her brother were visiting from Indiana with their parents and spent the day at the beach.
As they were getting ready to leave, she and her 9-year-old brother jumped into a 4-feet deep hole they dug, and the sand collapsed in on them. Until freed, Sloan was buried beneath her brother and was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Poulopoulos said the beach is less safe than it has been in the past, now that the town relies on “BSO and Pompano Beach Fire Rescue to randomly scope the shore.” Currently, the firefighter-paramedics and deputies patrolling the beach are not contractually obligated to provide rescue services, nor are they specifically trained in water safety or water rescue, he said.
“I’ve heard members of our community tell us that by adding lifeguards, we’re going to have big brother watching over us,” Poulopoulos said. “That’s not the point of a lifeguard.
“We have almost no beach safety. Everyone, swim at your own risk in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea,” Poulopoulos was quoted as saying in a local newspaper story.
Help! Lifeguard
Then this affair started me thinking about hiring a lifeguard at the oceanfront condo where I live in Boca Raton, FL.
The Chalfonte is a sprawling ocean front complex comprising two twin 22-story ocean front towers housing 378 families with a fleet of umbrellas along the beach with our logo imprinted on them, hovering over a sea of beach chairs making us look more like a resort hotel than a condominium.
But we’re private property on a public beach, Larry, our condo president reminded me. So, now I’ll heed what Peter Ticktin, my brilliant attorney client, and a long-time friend of Donald Trump so astutely advised me: “taking responsibility makes you responsible.” Ticktin and Trump went to high school together when they were both 18, which Ticktin wrote a book about titled “What Makes Trump Tick: My Years With Donald Trump from New York Military Academy to the Present.”
So, I concluded perhaps it’s best to leave it to the City of Boca Raton to provide lifeguards on this stretch of “public beach” to protect against drownings and other hazards climate change is creating in our warming ocean.
Yes, we’d better follow my knowledgeable attorney’s sage advice just to just put up signs saying “Swim at your own risk” since right up to the highest water mark, it’s a public beach and if we act responsibly, guess what? We’ll be responsible!
Thank you, Peter, for that wise advisory. I’ll swim at my own risk! After all, I was once a lifeguard myself decades ago. I’m still on the ball. I rarely have Biden-esque moments, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever confuse your long-time friend, former President Trump, with Kamala Harris as Biden once did in one of his famous flubs.
Perhaps now after what happened at this event in Pennsylvania, we’ll all be thinking a little more seriously about what’s needed more than ever today security . . . at all levels.
And perhaps hopefully now the mudslinging and political vitriol will tone down a few octaves and we’ll stop branding those we oppose as evil doers or crooked Joe’s, or modern conquistadors out to destroy democracy, self-serving egotists caring only about themselves.
Sometimes it takes a bullet. A bullet in the ear to wake us all up. A bullet that makes us all realize that we’re all human and how mortal we all are. And most importantly, that we’re all in this together.Â
If you want to know more about Planetary Lifeguard, read:​​https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tom-maddens-new-book-planetary-lifeguard-blowing-the-whistle-on-climate-change-available-on-amazon-302156219.html?tc=eml_cleartime
