After reading a local opinion piece this morning regarding Hurricane Wilma, I came to the sobering realization that this country might indeed be doomed. What is it about the American populace in general when so many of our brethren have come to expect that the cavalry will be coming to bail us out? For the same reason that folks build million dollar homes on the shifting sand dunes or in the middle of deserts where scarce water must be piped in from hundreds of miles away....and are OK with that....for the same reason that many of our citizens leave the most instinctual functions of humankind, that of teaching your children, entirely to outside parties, including the television and an increasingly underfunded school system....and are OK with that..
Particularly after seeing the failure of all levels of government hit home after New Orleans, one wonders at the
short term memory loss inherent in our being...
Here's a part of the article I mentioned:
For decades, emergency managers have warned Floridians to have three days' worth of provisions on hand to get through the immediate aftermath of hurricanes -- time enough for FEMA and local agencies to get roads cleared and recovery operations set up. But thousands of people didn't even have three hours' worth of supplies.
Economic status had little to do with the large numbers of the unprepared. In those long lines were Lexus SUVs, soccer moms who send their kids to private schools and professionals with six-figure incomes. Emergency officials know they have to provide immediate care for the disabled, the poor, the elderly and people who lost everything to the storm. But they didn't think they'd be tossing ice into BMWs, and they didn't think 2,000 cars would show up at Palm Beach Community College before the refrigerators had a chance to warm and television sets turned cold. They didn't think they'd hear all the whining and complaints from people with the means to take care of themselves.
Something was different about Hurricane Wilma. And something was different with South Floridians: Too many of them didn't prepare before the storm.
"There are two sets of people out there," says Dean Dimke, executive director of the Greater Palm Beach Area Chapter of the Red Cross. "There are those that don't have the means to prepare. That's the smaller number of people. The other group is the people who do have the means but, for whatever reason, did not take this storm seriously enough and did not prepare. That is the larger group."
The legions of unprepared whiners disparaged the heritage of pioneers who settled Florida and braved snakes, gators, mosquitoes, hostile tribes and life without air conditioning or bottled water. Have Floridians grown soft? Or worse, have they grown stupid?
A tough call, at this point. Certainly, however, too many people did not consider Wilma a serious threat. But in fairness to the citizenry, a number of disparate factors converged to help foster indifference before the storm and high anxiety after it.
For openers, Wilma was the perfect storm for slackers. A lot of east coasters were harboring the delusion that a hurricane making landfall on the left coast will lose much of its power by the time it crosses the peninsula. Wilma didn't. Another delusion was that bad things wouldn't happen so late in the year. Wilma made the last week of October memorable for all the wrong reasons.
Hurricane fatigue played a role, too. A storm season that exhausted the alphabet also wore down people's interest. God bless Max Mayfield, but Floridians saw so much of him this year he became as familiar as the pillow on the couch. People heard his monotone descriptions of potential disaster so often that they slumbered into an unresponsive state and dropped their guard. Homeowners who boarded their windows last year didn't this time.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/...
Personally, I was laughed at by friends who learned that my windows were covered by plywood before the storm even left the Yucatan area. Fresh provisions were laid in on top of the normal hurricane supplies stocked earlier in the year. Fresh gasoline was obtained for the generator. When the vicious tail end of Wilma finally blew through, we found ourselves enjoying the pioneer atmosphere of making hot coffee and soup on an open fire, enjoying ice cold beer with neighbors as we chainsawed through the debris. There was even some sadness when the power came back on 3 days later as we wondered whether getting back to "normal" was all that it's cracked up to be.
As for the large segment of the local population who did too little too late, panic set in, people drove for miles to sit idling in gas lines when the lack of power prevented most stations from selling their supplies. Police spent thousands of hours directing traffic on these lines while seniors and the most needy are still dealing with short supplies of food and water in Broward and Dade counties.
You would think that after witnessing Katrina, then Rita this year, and having Charley, Jeanne, Francis and Ivan last year crisscross the state, anyone living in this area would take the necessary precautions, but too few did and the result is frightening. The population has grown too complacent, too comfortable, too secure at a time when all the evidence is there telling the citizenry that to do so is placing your life in jeapordy.
Little wonder we as a nation were able to be taken advantage of by a devious and lying administration. We are asleep at the wheel, lulled by promises of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, promises to "get them over there" before "they" hit us over here. As Pogo said, "we have met the enemy and it is us."
Those three days of pioneer living were worth a lifetime of lessons for myself and my family. The calvary is not coming around the corner for many of us and until people wake up and come to that realization, we allow BushCo and their corporate cronies to take full advantage of our slumber.