Natural-born health services

rogerWILLIAMS rwilliams@florida-weekly.com

"If you can't be good, be careful, and

if you can't be careful, stay between the

ditches."

- Burdie Baker, Mayor of Charleston Park

Poor is as poor does, that's Burdie Baker's opinion. And Burdie, at 68 a self-described "Outsider, Black Redneck, the first and last of an endangered species," is the new (and old) Mayor of Charleston Park, informally elected.

COURTESY PHOTO Burdie Baker with Roger Williams' 5-yearold son Nash. Since I don't think that gives him enough to do, I propose assigning all those between the ages of 5 and 15 in Lee County to a Burdie- Bound School, a month of country living out near the Hendry County line, organized by Burdie himself. Something like Outward Bound School, but much more valuable.

Here's why: Lee County is said to have one of the highest suicide rates and drug-addiction rates in the country, and our obesity rate is DOUBLE the national average. Could this be true? It's also true that Burdie grew up on a sharecropper's farm in south Georgia, plowing with a mule and eating only what his family could grow.

The two facts - one complicated and contemporary and one as simple as a hand-dug well - may seem unrelated, but in truth they're the seeds of a perfect marriage: the marriage of knowledge and ignorance, and of wealth and poverty.

Burdie's the one with knowledge and wealth, and obese, unhappy children, our potential addicts, are the ones with ignorance and poverty, no matter how much money their parents

"I may be old," he told me, "but there's nothing wrong with my trigger finger."

And all these modern kids, obese or not: They may be young, but there's nothing wrong with putting them behind a mule. With the Mayor of Charleston Park. ¦