The Nation: Messing With Mother Nature

[paineinthearse]

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?pid=18079

Like all Americans, I have been horrified watching the destruction wrought on New Orleans by this natural disaster. And I suppose like others who share the name Katrina, it has been eerie hearing and reading my name all over the news. But when Fox News started calling the hurricane Killer Katrina, I started praying some right-wing idiot wouldn't stoop so low as to personalize or politicize this human suffering.

But wouldn't you know, the biggest dittohead on the block, Rush Limbaugh, is calling the storm Hurricane Katrina vanden Heuvel and warning that the left is going to use this tragedy against the right. Jonah Goldberg, who has never seen a bad joke bandwagon he could resist jumping on with both feet, blogged, and I quote, "It would be pretty cool if Fox played to caricature and repeatedly referred to the hurricane as Katrina vanden Heuvel." Not satisfied, he went on to imagine the headlines, "The destruction from Katrina vanden Heuvel is expected to be massive...The poor and disabled are particularly likely to suffer from the effects of Katrina vanden Heuvel."

What can one say to such heartlessness? Americans are dying, and this is their idea of respect for the dead. At least Limbaugh has the excuse that drug abuse tends to stunt emotional development. What Jonah's problem is nobody has yet discovered.

Natural disasters should be above politics. (President Bush's decision to send his father and President Clinton to organize aide for the tsunami was one of his very few international PR successes since 9/11.) It's so very easy and childish to personalize tragedy. (Did you hear the one about OxyContin's new tagline: 'What a Rush!'?) It is so cheap to politicize a natural disaster. (Did you see the headline about Louisiana's National Guard watching the destruction of their homeland from Iraq?) But let's try to empathize with those who are suffering through no fault of their own and think about how we can help them.

[phantom power]

1. I don't know if I agree.

These storms are a result of decisions we've made about where we get our energy. Political decisions as well as economic decisions.

Our lack of preparedness for these storms is also a result of political decisions. Just one example: the thousands of National Guard troops who can't help with the recovery because they are in Iraq.

The fact that the coastline has been built up so tremendously, in an area of known vulnerability to storms and flooding, is a result of political decisions.

We need to be able to have honest, political, conversations about these problems. Otherwise, we're just going to keep making the same bad decisions over and over again.

[izzie]

2. One does seem to make thing worse with fooling around with things.

I was in a storm in Alaska that was said to have torn up homes because the trees used to stop the winds but they were all cut for homes. So the homes stopped the wind and it was really some wind. We see this all over and we never seem to learn.