Making Change

To make fiction compelling there needs to be conflict. The boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back paradigm is well known for a reason. Things must go badly wrong before they can get better. The love scene doesn’t work unless it’s preceded by a fight or friction between the characters. The protagonist can’t win until he faces off against the antagonist and defeats him.

Beside physical conflict, I like to give my characters something to think about, and get into their heads to show their thought process. The main character in my Kurt Hunter Mystery series is constantly faced with the conflict created by the Dual Mandate of the National Park Service—preservation versus use. To make things more interesting Biscayne National Park, where he is special agent in charge, is located less than twenty miles from Miami. Having a pristine wilderness area adjacent to a major metropolitan area makes for strange bedfellows.

Though he might not know it, Kurt is a Stoic. In one sentence the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy is the serenity prayer. You can’t control what you can’t control, so get over it and be prepared to accept the crap that comes at you.

In the last few books, Backwater Haven and Backwater Predator Kurt is faced with dealing with the Dual Mandate, in the form of huge sandbar parties inside the park. The gatherings, often with a hundred boats and many times that more people are destructive to the seagrass beds which are an essential ingredient in the ecosystem. The loud and boisterous atmosphere degrades the parks pristine experience for other visitors.

To determine the range of acceptable choices he used the Overton Window, to help determine policy, but to actually make the changes he needs to change the people.

I created the character of Wayne Deumont to bring this perspective into the story. A large black man can say things some of my other characters can’t and with his fictional background with the Park Police, he’s been in cities faced with similar situations.

New York in the seventies and eighties is an example from his fictional and my own personal backgrounds. I grew up outside New York in the seventies and remember how scary it could be to ride the subway at night or walk down some streets. New York chose to implement Quality of life policing which changed the mindset of the people and created positive change. San Fransisco is currently faced with the same problems and is just starting to accept that they have one.

Quality of life policing requires persistence and determination. Enforcing even the smallest of infractions is difficult. As humans we are programed to take the path of least resistance. Writing tickets and arresting people for seemingly minor infractions feels like busy work, but has an effect. Another part of the program was vigilance in repairs. Broken windows were repaired immediately, graffiti scrubbed off subway cars and bridge abutmenta before the paint was dry and similar measures created an atmosphere where people started taking care of and respecting things.

Kurt and Wayne chose this path. They called it making stupid expensive. Only time will tell if it has the desired effect.