Thursday, September 08, 2005

Katrina's Lake George

It’s now a couple of weeks that have slipped by without my yet registering my outrage that the media seem coordinated in blaming New Orleans on nature. Millions of people living below sea level behind levees entrusted (forcibly) to the government?!? When they know that hurricanes are perennial? some worse than others?

Last year the hurricanes hit Sebring hard. They’re part of what killed my Catherine. I held her hand while the electricity was out for nearly a week, while the temperatures in the shade were over one hundred: no AC, no powered fans ... Katrina missed us this time but then bludgeoned the north Gulf of Mexico.

I’ll bet that New Orleans had a dozen or more Peters who tried to put their finger in the dike, but were arrested by the Bushes who wanted to monopolize all such activities for the "experts."

No, we can’t have real teachers in the schools. We crucify real teachers, pour hemlock in their ear, won’t publish them, drive their already published books out of print, hound them from the libraries ... The schools are the preserve of morons.

2005 09 24 Since posting the above I’ve been reminded that New Orleans’ population had been artificially inflated by this and that government interference. Leave the Mississippi alone and some people will live there anyway, periodically getting washed about: as Faulkner so wonderfully evokes in his Old Man. Some nine million people lived along the Mississippi Valley before 1492. They knew mud.
But nothing like current numbers: who therefore ought to know mud.

I remind all: again: read Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature!

Humans are social animals. We will always form groups, then gang up. But nation states, with governments, have gone way too far.

No comments: