We fondly refer to our little corner of Paradise as “the bubble,” as we are surrounded here in the Westernmost reaches of the Florida Panhandle with natural beauty, delightful climate, gentle breezes off the Santa Rosa Sound, peace, silence and tranquility, and some of the most friendly people we have ever had the pleasure of meeting. As we watched wonderful places we had enjoyed visiting, like Portland, Seattle, and Chicago and places we had fallen in love with, like San Francisco, be ripped apart by savages and/or soiled by the filth of the decadent and depraved, we cozily comforted ourselves in the “sure” knowledge that, to use a phrase with sinister underpinnings, “it couldn’t happen here.”

We were wrong.