After eight months of feckless leadership and a racist, anemic response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria on the island of Puerto Rico, the numbers are in, and those numbers are terrible. While the Trump administration pretended that a couple dozen people had died as a result of the natural disaster, the real number approaches 5,000. The island of Puerto Rico has yet to have power fully restored, and we are months and months into this process. And the year is 2018, not 1918. As CNN’s national security analyst Juliette Kayyem wrote on Friday, the numbers do not lie. And our government’s response to what happened with Hurricane Maria continues to not only baffle, but portends to a much more serious threat to the health and security of our citizens.
It is important to note that the Harvard study's figure is more than twice the death toll from Hurricane Katrina -- which happened during the George W. Bush presidency -- and puts to rest Donald Trump's boastful claim that during Maria few had died. For a President who likes to put much in competitive terms, it's not a comparison he can win now. He is indeed "the best" at something: The single most deadly natural disaster in modern America happened on his watch.
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What the Harvard study exposes is more than just a number discrepancy. This is, in the end, not about numbers. It is a moral failure of such epic proportions that even someone like me -- somewhat hardened by a career in the homeland security field -- can't quite contain the emotions. How could the Trump administration get it so wrong? The answer is that it did not put a priority on getting it right.
I have a great confidence in the career experts working in emergency management. But the political decision to simply ignore, to brush away, what the number of fatalities could actually be is one of negligence and hubris. It is as if the thinking went: If no one notices how many died, then the administration can't be blamed for their failed response.
What Kayyem goes on to explain is that our government is staying willfully ignorant of not only the tragedies going on in Puerto Rico as a result of this disaster, but the important data and information that we need to collect in order to make plans on how to best protect us from the next natural disaster. Because natural disasters will happen and are going to happen, over and over again. Kayyem explains that “how” people die is as important to know as “how many” people have died.
Knowing the reasons people died during a disaster can inform policies on warning systems, infrastructure, and emergency response. Knowing how and why people died is arguably the most important thing to learn from a natural disaster, as it can tell us the best ways to direct our resources, whether that be creating better roads for emergency responders, or setting up earlier warning systems. Should the electrical grid be the priority? Should disaster education be on the top of the docket?
The Republican Party employs a blockade on research and data all the time, of course. They use it in order to stifle research into gun violence. They use it to thwart scientific research and study of climate change. It isn’t done out of any moral philosophical place other than: if we don’t know we can argue not to do anything about it. It’s that simple.
In the case of places like New Orleans and Puerto Rico, the piddling responses are rooted in a racism that dehumanizes people in such a way as to allow “leaders” like George W. Bush and Donald Trump to neglect American citizens, leaving them to die. It’s the same dehumanizing racism that lets good “Christians” who vote for those very same leaders to throw their hands up in the air and simply offer “thoughts and prayers,” while not demanding anything of the people in charge.
For a political party that consistently wants an audit on everything the government spends that isn’t a bomb or a tax giveaway to the rich, their lack of “curiosity” is astounding and obviously hypocritical. But if you want to pinch pennies when it comes to natural disaster relief, you should at least get the data that will help you best maximize your pennies.
Elections matter because the people leading our very powerful and resourceful country end up making broad, sweeping policies that will kill thousands, if not millions of people, during their time in office. How many thousands and how many millions is something that We The People have the responsibility to demand an accounting of. We have that responsibility because in the end, the blood is on all of our hands.
It’s easy to say that we should throw a bunch of money at Puerto Rico, but it’s a dumb thing to do. We should give Puerto Rico a boatload of resources but we should also have a good idea of what and how to employ those resources to best strengthen Puerto Rico, and the people who call Puerto Rico home.