Opinion: Milton is a Florida nightmare. And we can’t meet the moment.

Yet another city-destroying, record-shattering tempest, supercharged in overheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico, takes aim at Florida. There is malice in its every aspect: its pinpoint eye; its unusual west-to-east march; its raw power, stunningly close to the maximum winds Earth is capable of producing; even its very name  – Milton – conjures up a nightmare of paradise lost. Nearly the whole of Florida has something to lose, though none more than Tampa Bay, the sparkling, heavily populated region that is home to two great American cities.
Florida’s well-oiled hurricane-response infrastructure, honed over many years in this steamy locus of tropical dysfunction, feels overmatched, having just done battle against Milton’s predecessor, Hurricane Helene, whose remnants are piled up on lawns from Pinellas to Jacksonville – projectiles in waiting for Milton’s trek across Interstate 4.
Floridians are exhausted: The roads are jammed, the grocery aisles picked through, gas depleted. Florida is a beautiful place but one that also demands a steep price from those who dare to enjoy the bounty of colors, waters and sun.
This is getting old.
Opinion:Helene devastated my NC community. What I saw next helped me survive.
And something feels broken this time, something fundamentally shattered within us: Our country, transformed in its own way by an overheated presidential campaign, treated Helene as if it were any other rat race.
In record time, that hurricane ceased being our collective enemy – the foul thing that drowned towns and cities from Florida to North Carolina’s verdant western expanse – and became instead an opportunity to confirm our priors, to get one over on someone else, catnip for conspiracy theorists. When real-life disaster victims didn’t match our preconceived notions of what disaster victims should look like, we simply made them up whole cloth – and then shared those fake AI-generated images incessantly on social media to feed outrage in others, too.
Politicians appear less eager to help defray the cost of disasters that strike elsewhere. The heroic efforts of government scientists, who have become remarkably skilled at long-range hurricane forecasts, and federal bureaucrats, who help pick up the pieces, are under threat.
Opinion:Florida braces for dual threat of Hurricane Milton and Trump’s self-serving lies
Misinformation and its authors thrive in darkness – and there is no darker moment than the confusing hours and days that follow a major storm’s romp through a highly populated area. With Milton, the crazies have come out even before landfall.
We’ve truly lost the plot.
If Florida’s hurricane-response systems feel overmatched, its politics are dreadfully inadequate to meet the moment. Much has been said recently of Florida government’s infamous bury-its-head approach to climate change. This speak-no-evil-hear-no-evil policy has of course not had its intended effect of warding off hurricanes fueled by the undeniably hotter waters around us.
Its only upshot has been to put Florida on constant wartime footing and woefully behind the eight ball on resilience – the astronomically expensive and complicated task of adapting vulnerable cities to the more dangerous world we are creating – and more grounded pocketbook problems, like the state’s broken property insurance market.
These are problems that don’t yield short-term political gain, so they’re the kind of problems likely to fester.
History will find it curious that those who had the most to lose were also the most recalcitrant about the changing world.
State leaders, and most certainly its governor, come in for harsh assessments on this paradox. Florida has had good governors and bad ones in its modern history, but all of them proved to be apolitical and empathetic in hurricane response. This tradition, too, seems fundamentally broken, but there will be time to dwell on that later.
As of Tuesday morning, Milton is haunting Florida’s western coast like a nightmare. Let’s instead dream of a miracle.
Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA TODAY Network. This column first appeared in The Florida Times-Union. Follow him on Twitter: @NateMonroeTU or email him at [email protected]