A passenger walks past a flight information board displaying several canceled flights at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025. | AP Photo, Stephanie Scarbrough
Published on February 2, 2025 at 11:35 am
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In the hours after an American Airlines jet and a Black Hawk helicopter collided above the Potomac River last Wednesday evening, ending the lives of 67 people, it was possible not to know what was happening if you were inside the airport itself.
American Airlines customers like me received a fragmentary drip-drip-drop of information. There was a reasonable case to wait it out, like some fog delay at Newark.
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It was a fog of a different sort. And if you were saving your phone battery, you could miss the light. A bar near my gate had the breaking news of the broken system of air traffic control and its deadly consequences on its television, briefly, until someone turned the TV to basketball.
With no announcement in the building of how long Reagan National would be closed, it was tempting to just sit in the baggage claim, bathed in the sounds of “101 Strings” and the “Longines Symphonette.” Why would they keep playing the easy listening hits at the end of the world? Workers continued to clean the luggage conveyor belt.
The question I got from people outside the situation: How could you not know what was going on?
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We assume that if we are on the periphery of tragedy, we will act heroically, in the stalwart, square-jawed resolution seen in turn-of-the-century action movies. We might even look the parts as we are impeccably attired in our Brooks Brothers suits and our Allen Edmonds shoes, all with the brio and sheen of accomplishment.
Meanwhile, as I hung suspended in an airport far away, local and state politics offered reminders of the fragility of life and the frivolity of political conflict.
The burial of Sam Mousa, one of the city’s guiding lights in terms of public administration and executing a vision that truly made this the Bold New City of the South in many ways, brought together people from across the political spectrum who knew him and loved him.
How many people’s lives did Sam touch? How many jobs did he save? How many projects were completed just as they should be because of his ceaseless attention to detail.
Even my own life was affected directly by one of Sam’s decisions more than half a decade ago.
After my offhand remark that the city had removed trees from the right of way in front of my home but never replaced them, Mousa ensured that a pair of crepe myrtles – which I found out only last week were his favorite tree – were placed there just as they were in front of other houses on the block. They are potent, constant reminders of the lives he touched, and if you lived here long enough in the old days, you might have some of your own.
The trees are towering now, healthy and strong.
Amid that rare suspension of partisan rancor, local and state elected officials continue to engage in quotidian conflicts.
Consider the no-confidence resolution brewing on council against Michael Fackler, the outsider lawyer from the private sector who those same legislators confirmed for the job with minimal vetting because they’d punched themselves out blocking Randy DeFoor from the job. They say he’s in the mayor’s pocket on issues like the garbage fee dispute with Meridian. Fackler’s friends at the Jacksonville Bar disagree. It’s a matter of subjective interpretation, but the conflict says that the parties are looking to have a turf war.
That’s not Sam Mousa’s Jacksonville.
Meanwhile, Tallahassee Republicans are fighting among themselves over immigration legislation.
House and Senate leadership and most of the rank and file like the TRUMP Act, which expands state prerogatives but gives the authority to Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson.
“They’re trying to take my power away,” lame duck DeSantis, now entering his seventh year of politics by ham-handed fist, said during a recent media hit last week.
The governor doesn’t seem to have processed the diminishing returns of the bully pulpit. He wants all the control, including for things like international deportation flights, which is ironic from the same state leadership that can’t enforce speed limits on highways.
The irony, meanwhile, is the same governor worked to gerrymander the Legislature to create the GOP supermajority. Thus illustrating that conflict and finger pointing on every issue, at the end of the day, are inevitable.
