Paradise is hard to sustain ... in a place with so many ethnic, age and class groups coexisting in ever more crowded communities. Nearly 1,000 people move to Florida each day, and the churning mix of blacks, Hispanics, retirees from other states, urban liberals, suburban moderates and conservative-leaning rural residents make for a volatile place with deep divisions and conflicting priorities.

"We have more intense collisions between gray hairs and brown hairs, Midwest people and Northeast people, money and nonmoney," said James Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida. "The barriers are not very high, so the collisions can occur as if you're on one of those little electric cars at the fair, banging into things."

Lots of things go relatively unnoticed in Florida when tempests like the Schiavo case erupt, and it helps to take stock of what was missed, if only in hopes of predicting the next firestorm.

There was the abduction and murder of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford in Homosassa, and the subsequent news, reported by The Miami Herald, that the whereabouts of 1,800 sex offenders registered with the state are unknown. The Legislature debated a bill that would allow law-abiding citizens to use deadly force against an attacker in public. The indictment of Orlando's mayor on a charge of paying someone to collect absentee ballots moved forward, and news emerged that a petting zoo was the likely source of a bacterial infection that sickened two dozen people, mostly children.

What will thrust Florida back into the international spotlight? And will there come a day when it cedes its sensational-news title to another state? The National Enquirer, after all, just moved from Boca Raton, where its offices were famously infected with anthrax in 2001, to New York City.

Mr. Kane, the pollster, said it was a matter of Florida, which became the 27th state in 1845, needing to mature.

"When people have lived here for a while and have roots and multiple generations, some other state will become the next Florida," he said. "Some other place where it's warm and there's a lot of land and opportunity for people to make their fortune."

Maybe Arizona, he said.

I've never really been fond of Florida -- the warmth is nice enough, but it's too humid, too flat and largely too sprawling for my tastes. Some of my family has moved there, but I doubt I'll ever join them. Still, it's not impossible. If I do, perhaps the parade will have already moved on by then.