I can't sleep. If it wasn't cloudy, the sun would be coming up soon. The first humidity drenched tendrils of Hurricane Katrina are just reaching Newark NJ and I breathe the heavy, death-soaked droplets and they make me very wary. The other day I watched the hurricane on TV, and New Orleans continues to be deluged by broken levees, even as I write.
Doesn't that sound bizarre? That I "watched the hurricane on TV"? Imagine that, that you can witness such an event "live". And the feeling I had was not unlike the feeling I had while I watched the WTC explode on 9-11 - it was the unmistakable feeling of dread, devastation, and inevitability.
What's the difference in these situations? Well, not much, according to FEMA. Here's a quote from
http://www.americanprogressaction.org:
In 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked a major hurricane strike on New Orleans as
"among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country," directly behind a terrorist strike on New York City.
Imagine that! And to continue the idiocy:
Two months ago, President Bush took an ax to budget funds that would have helped New Orleans prepare
for such a disaster. The New Orleans branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suffered a "record $71.2 million"
eduction in federal funding, a 44.2 percent reduction from its 2001 levels. Reports at the time said that thanks
to the cuts, "major hurricane and flood protection projects will not be awarded to local engineering firms. ...
Also, a study to determine ways to protect the region from a Category 5 hurricane has been shelved for now."
As I watched the hurricane, on TV, from my cozy air-conditioned bedroom on a sunny morning, one thought kept running through my head: "What's to say that New York City is immune from this kind of disaster?" But the consequences of that scenario were just too too unimaginable for my brain to comprehend. I could not create a reaction scenario for my hypothetical action scenario, as the creators of the movie, "The Day After" were able to do. I hope their scenario was way, way, way over the top!
The fact that the Bush Administration refuses to acknowledge Global Warming as a problem is .... what - Wrong? Well, yes, to me it is. But that's because I value life, I value the world we live in, I value my child's future. But his (their) agenda is different from mine, and to him/them it is NOT wrong. It's not "wrong" to kill hundreds of thousands and maim millions of people via the cloak of "collateral damage", create untold chaos and abject poverty around the world, and wreck the fragile infrastructure of our earth so that a welcome mat is put out for natural disasters that could be avoided with a little prudence.
[To see the whole letter please click on the title of this post.]
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