Disasters sock it to the East Coast

Some post-Irene thoughts. I know Hurricane Irene certainly wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Does that mean the media and government should be battered for sounding a loud alarm? Well, opinions are, you know, like … (See Paragraph 3.) Luckily my niece and her family in Virginia and my long-time friend Sally in Western Massachusetts all came through Irene just fine.

I had to work earlier tonight so I haven’t had a chance to do all the post-Irene reading that I would like. But inevitably, you are going to have idiots who would bitch if they had a loaf of bread under each arm. With that in mind, I present an article about the those brave Hurricane Hunters who have to fly those old, durable WP-3Ds out across Mississippi Sound and into the eye of the meanest cyclones of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico that one would ever want to see. In this day and age, you have people who are so worried about all the ridiculousness whipped up about the deficit for the sake of politics alone that they would dare to blame people like the Hurricane Hunters who give us the early detection science on tropical cyclones.

And heavens knows we had plenty of problems during the bad old days of “Heckuva Job Brownie’s” FEMA. This includes during Katrina and afterwards when we had massively destructive hurricanes of our own down here in Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana with Rita and a couple of years later with Ike. But that doesn’t mean we should play catch with the funding for the disaster du jour as is being planned for by our geniuses in Congress like the House Majority Leader and weasel-lookalike Eric Cantor. Weasel wants disaster funding to be offset by spending cuts. What an a**hole. By the way, Brownie showed up on one of the cable networks over the weekend as a talking head of lettuce.

I remind all who care, hurricane season is not over. Luckily, Tropical Storm remnant Jose is heading into the North Atlantic. Meanwhile Tropical Depression 12 looks to be just east of Puerto Rico at the end of the National Hurricane Center’s famous 5-day cone.

Finally, last week’s earthquake in the Northeast also should remind us that we live in a large country where we have many different types of natural disasters which may try our patience and our federal, state and local governments’ abilities to respond.

Few of us, go through an earthquake and a tropical storm in the same week as did my friend Sally. She recounted in an e-mail how she had no idea what was happening when she felt last week’s shake-up.

 “My chair was rocking front and back and I looked at my legs moving and wondered if I was getting sick,” she said. “I looked up at the wall in front of my desk and it was just weird – moving.  Then I turned my head to the left and saw the coats on the coat rack swaying back and forth about 2-3 inches … “

Sally, who works for her city government, called 9-1-1 and later wondered if she was first to do so. I have never been through an earthquake so I could just imagine how discombobulated I would feel if I had gone through something like that.

People like Eric Cantor and others who don’t know what they’re talking about need to think before they speak. They first should walk in the shoes of others although if they walk in mine I suggest that in the very least they wear a couple of pairs of socks.