I had expected my flight from Tokyo to JFK to be delayed by the storm. I landed ahead of schedule. The A train was running on time. The sky was beautiful. Walking down my street from the subway station, I saw little sign of the storm's passing. I thought New York had been lucky, for Hurricane Irene had been forecasted to ravage the Northeast as a category 3 storm.
The colder waters of the Atlantic Ocean weakened the winds and the government was harshly criticized for fear-mongering the population without need. Like Katrina the details of the death and destruction caused by the high seas, storm surge, flooding, and high winds were ignored by the media, since the stricken areas had been cut off the power grid by snapped telephone lines, electrical failure, and washed-out bridges. A more accurate assessment of the catastrophe showed that Hurricane Irene will be counted as one of the natural calamities to hit the continental USA.
Scores of deaths and billions of dollars worth of damage have forced the President to declare several states in need of federal disaster relief. My friends in the Catskills are stranded in their houses. Riverside roads were erased by the overflowing water. Vermont was hit particularly hard. Millions are without electricity.
My apartment had been flooded from the roof. AP, my landlord spotted water seeping into his son's bedroom and stopped the waterfall flowing over the window sill from wrecking the ceilings.
Everyone had their own hurricane story.
Richie Boy's mother and brother fled Lido Beach for his one-bedroom Chelsea apartment. He told his wife that the two refugees were staying for two days. After the first Richie Boy put them in a hotel.
"Having them at my apartment was like my own perfect storm."
He got off easy.
Certain regions of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States will take weeks, if not months, to regain a semblance of normalcy.
GOP leaders were quick to attack any aid to devastated communities. Ron Paul contested that the nation would be better served by private industry taking over FEMA's role in disaster relief. Vermont's Socialist senator responded to such drivel as another attempt by the right to cut services to save the tax cuts for the rich, although austerity obsessive messages such as that delivered by the press flak for Virginia's Eric Cantor are pressing for triage tactics to deal with future disasters by cutting more from the budget to finance government response to hurricanes and earthquake. with privatization.
There was an old joke about the difference between a liberal and a conservative.
If a man is drowning 20 feet off shore a liberal will throw 40 feet of rope and walk away from the beach, while a conservative will throw out 10 feet of rope and tell the drowning man to swim 10 feet to save his life.
Now the far right of the GOP would not bother to throw out any rope, if the drowning man hadn't bought insurance.
They angrily suggest to solve the problem the old-fashoined way.
By having their transvestite bearded god in a muumuu kill their enemies one way or the other.
They have seen the enemies and the enemies are the poor and middle-class.
Their brave new world would be better without any other social groups other than the rich and their slaves.
Yahweh get busy and make Commie Vermont pay for its sins.
Teir punishment is long overdue.
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