Carl Hiaasen - Kick Ass - Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

Miami officer Charlie Taylor, who specializes in tracking gypsy and traveler families: "When you talk to an old woman who's lost her entire life savings, it breaks your heart. What do you say to console her?"

Now is the season when the gypsies and traveler families start north, but police say they'll be back. Florida has been very good to them.

Imagine the scandal if 10 small children died, one by one, at the same day-care center.

The press would swarm like hornets, indictments would rain, and the dump would be nailed shut forever. Which is exactly what should happen.

It's different, though, when the dead are not so young.

A recent series in this newspaper exposed an appalling pattern of abuse, neglect and mysterious fatalities at state institutions, nursing homes and boarding homes. The victims were not babies but adults—the weak, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, the mentally impaired.

At one North Dade facility, the Landmark Learning Center, at least 10 patients have died under suspicious circumstances during recent years.

Among the casualties was a retarded paraplegic named Richard Daniels, killed by a blow to the abdomen. In some places that's called murder.

No one has been arrested for Daniels' death. Landmark claims he suffered the fatal injury by falling against the arm of his wheelchair—an explanation not embraced by the family, police or medical examiners. Meanwhile, Landmark remains open.

Administrator Ulysses Davis, who was temporarily relieved of command this week, said his facility had made no mistakes in treating patients, but added (in the understatement of the century): "There's always room for improvement."

More often it's not violence but pure neglect that kills. Earlier this year, a 48-year-old retarded woman died of a bowel obstruction that, according to investigators, wasn't noticed or properly treated by Landmark health workers. Another case: A 27-year-old woman died, riddled with cancer that Landmark doctors somehow failed to discern. Another: An epileptic patient died after a seizure on the floor; Landmark workers said they thought he was only taking a nap.

Unfortunately, such horror stories aren't uncommon. Across the state, old and disabled patients have been found half-starved, consumed by bedsores, crippled by undiagnosed bone fractures. Time and again nothing happens. Nothing changes.

Responsibility is tangled among too many state agencies. Weak laws make it hard to prosecute adult abuse cases, and harder still to shut down shabby nursing homes. Health-care workers, grossly underpaid and sometimes undertrained, are frequently reluctant to report patient abuse for fear of losing their jobs.The system is perfectly designed to perpetuate itself.

Right now, in the great state of Florida, a guy who kicks a dog stands a better chance of going to jail than someone who slugs an invalid in a nursing home.

People moved out of sight are also moved out of our consciousness. Often they are as helpless as children, as trusting as kittens. Yet it's almost as if, because they're grown-ups (not cuddly babies), their deaths are not so tragic or important.

True, people die every day in nursing homes. If it happens to your grandmother or grandfather, you pray that the end was peaceful and natural, that they weren't punched or starved or ignored to death. Because if they were, you stand little chance of getting the truth and virtually no chance of getting justice.

Government tends to react the way society does, with emotions deciding our priorities. When a child under HRS supervision is tortured by a monstrous parent, the reaction is an appropriate convulsion of outrage and cries for dramatic reform.

The death of Richard Daniels, age 43, is no less sickening. And he is but one of the forgotten.

That's why the case of Landmark Learning Center is so disgraceful. With the same track record, a day-care center would've been boarded up a long time ago.

For that matter, so would a kennel.

Dade's so-called English-only ordinance will probably be repealed this week. The sky won't fall. The earth won't quake. And the Metro commission won't start conducting its meetings in Spanish.

Yet many will call it a sad day when the law is scrapped. Some warn that its repeal will legitimize ethnic separatism, dual languages dividing dual cultures. But if the English-only law was (as supporters insist) meant to unify Dade, it was a flop.

The ordinance was passed overwhelmingly in 1980 as native entrenchment against a tidal wave of foreign-speaking immigrants: All government meetings and publications were to be in English. So there!

Well, guess what happened in the next 12 years. Hispanics became a majority in Dade. The county's politics, culture and economy transformed—and plenty of folks didn't like it. Thousands packed up and left for Lake City or Ocala. They're still leaving, and it's understandable. Watching one's hometown change so radically is tough, confusing and often painful. Getting out is one solution.

Not all who stayed have adjusted easily. Some of us crackers won't ever get used to hearing Spanish at McDonald's. How come them people don't learn to speak American? In moments of impatience, I've had similar grouchy thoughts.

Then I remember all the money this newspaper spent trying to get some Spanish into my skull, with minimal results. Someone as linguistically stunted as myself is in no position to lecture anybody about learning a second tongue.

The message of the English-only law is that those who come to this country should adopt our language. That sounds fair, but the reality of mass immigration is another story ...

Today, 57 percent of Dade residents speak something other than English at home. All those people are touched by government and need to be well-informed. As a practical matter, it would be irresponsible—no, idiotic—to neglect the thousands who haven't yet learned English, or can't. Societies that exclude people pay a terrible price, as we know firsthand.

Judging from the hysteria, some seem to think abolishing English-only is equivalent to imposing Spanish-only. That's absurd. The official language of Dade will always be English. We don't need a law saying so.

The ordinance is a relic of Anglo defiance that offends many Hispanics, bilingual or not. Citizens of Dade United says it's simply intended to save taxpayers money. Yet there's no mistaking the resentment from CODU's Enos Schera, who told the New York Times : "They have already established another Cuba inside Dade County, and now they are forcing Spanish down our throats."

Nobody's forcing Spanish down mine, nor would I force English down theirs. You can't. Assimilation happens at its own pace—and, believe it or not, it is happening here.

Bob Joffe, a well-known pollster, writes that "Spanish is dying among Hispanic voters" in Dade. What he means is that bilingualism is rising significantly. More than half of foreign-born Hispanic voters surveyed said they didn't care if they were interviewed in English or Spanish.

Such increasing fluency suggests that, 20 years from now, language won't be such a burning issue. Let's hope not, because it's the least of our troubles. Runaway growth, runaway crime, the water crisis, government waste—you want something heavy to worry about, take your pick.

Find people who can solve those problems, and it won't matter if they speak English, Spanish or Mandarin Chinese. We'll find an interpreter. It's not the language that counts, it's the ideas.

In a political season that can charitably be described as uninspiring, there is actually something worth voting for.