Dear Future Cyberarchivist who, while sifting through ancient internet postings from bygone centuries in search of history, has come across this blog chronicling the events and observations of a typical day-to-day life in the first quarter of the 21st Century AD: On August 25, 2017, about a week and a half ago from when I write this, a terrible natural disaster hit our planet in the form a monster hurricane that we named Hurricane Harvey. Though Hurricane Harvey was born days earlier as a tropical storm that had been sweeping its way northward through the smaller seas of the Atlantic Ocean, it swelled into the destructive behemoth it was to become only after it hit land on the the eastern coast of Texas, a state on the southwestern coast of the country where I live, a country known at this time as the United States of America. Unlike typical hurricanes that ferociously blow their way across land areas, weakening in energy and force as they travel until they finally dissipate into the atmosphere, Harvey rather blustered along the eastern Texas seaboard until it arrived above the city of Houston where it stalled and sluggishly churned for several days, in a short time dumping almost 50 inches of rain over the city. Houston, a city of almost 2 1/2 million people but with over 5 1/2/ million living in its metropolitan area, is at this time the 4th largest city in the United States. The devastation inflicted upon Houston and its environs, as well as upon the cities that it hit hard before and after Houston, ...has been un-speakable.
But the hearts of our nation went out to the victims of Hurricane Harvey, and there was a compassionate outpouring from all over the country of aid, money and countless volunteers into the afflicted areas, ...people opened their homes to strangers in distress, ...and small boat owners from all over the area contiguous seacoast states, who became known as the Cajun Navy, arrived with their boats to rescue stranded victims of the hurricane's flood. It was a moment in time when we joined together as a nation in our care, concern, prayers and help for the victims of Hurricane Harvey,
And yet alongside the suffering and rush of efforts to bring its alleviation, arose some grand ironies. Five years earlier a devastating hurricane called Hurricane Sandy had hit the coastline of the state of New Jersey, and at that time a self-important senator from Texas named Ted Cruz voted to deny government aid to the people of New Jersey whose lives had been devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Now it is he who must turn his fellow senators, including those from New Jersey whose pleas he denied, for aid for the people of his state. The current elected leader of our country - though many say not fairly elected, as our country's election law contains a strange twist which does not necessarily hand election victory to the candidate who wins the most votes, as this man did not, his opponent having actually received 3 million more votes than he did - is a vile, inept billionaire named Donald Trump, and I wish it to go down in history that I was among those who stood against this man from the start. A bigot who has given succor to those low-lifes who embrace a hateful ethos of white supremacy that is currently infecting our nation, Donald Trump's platform has been to insult Mexico, the neighboring country to the south of our Texas border, to call Mexicans bad people, and to rid our country without exception of all undocumented Mexican immigrants, even those who were brought to this country as babies. Donald Trump has promised to build a massive, 2,000-mile, 15 billion dollar wall between the United States and Mexico. And yet in response to Hurricane Harvey's devastation the Mexican government has been sending food, boats, vehicles and other aid to help the people of Texas, and has offered continued aid, which the Governor of Texas has gratefully accepted. No thank you from Donald Trump has yet been extended to Mexico. Other ironies will play out as this cataclysmic event goes down in history, among them one irony having to do with Texans' historical hostility towards the Federal government whose aid they now desperately need , another rising from former animosity towards undocumented immigrants, every one of whom will now be needed to help rebuild this devastated state. It is hypothesized that the destruction wreaked upon one of this country's largest population centers, including the residual damage to infrastructure, diminished production of Texas's oil, which the whole nation depends upon, and the region's need for probably 150 billion dollars in government aid, could change the whole political landscape of the United States. And even as I write this another new hurricane called Hurricane Irma is threatening another round of devastation, this time to Florida, a state along our country's southeastern seaboard. Whether these natural disasters our country is now suffering change us for the better, worse, or not at all is something that we here in the United States in 2017 cannot know. Only you, unknown archivist of the future, do. References:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/hurricane-harvey-texas.html?mcubz=1 https://news.vice.com/story/mexico-is-sending-aid-to-texas-even-as-trump-insults-them https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/04/us/texas-storm-federal-aid-abbott-cruz.html?mcubz=1&_r=0
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"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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