Having served on South Florida Water Management District Commissions for 14 consecutive years, I have traveled, as an environmentalist and conservationist, extensively through the 16 counties from Kissimmee to Key West and the Dry Tortugas.

Within South Florida’s 16 counties are neighborhoods that are differentiated by the dark race of most inhabitants, the depressing housing stock and seeming lack of accoutrements afforded by or to white communities in this stratified area. Discrimination is affably displayed as though we remain in a pre-civil rights era.

Perhaps there should be no wonder that TV reporters have thus far avoided the utter ugliness to be encountered within these ravaged neighborhoods. Viewers have seen the unbelievable destruction along beach and intercoastal areas of Southwest and Central Florida but may be aghast to see the effect of discrimination never imagined. Yet America’s original sin, replayed over and over, century after century, must remain the nation’s cognitive dissonance.

Al Calloway