or, what not to do after massive natural disasters.

I tell my children that I have been most fortunate to live my first 50  years in one of the most blessed periods of world history.  Born an American in 1955 I have enjoyed food aplenty, great medicine, freedom from catastrophic war, absence of plague, nice vacations, and fairly easy money and survival.

I tell my children their lives and the second half of my life will be more tumultuous and adventurous.

The climate is changing.  Economics are changing.  Everything is changing.

In such a situation it makes no sense to defiantly and proudly announce that when areas of land are destroyed by the changing climate, we will rebuild.  Irrational machoism will lead us into national bankruptcy.  Our forefathers were smart.  When they found the town flooded because they built in the valley, they moved it up the hill.

Of course, that was before electoral lines, racial gamesmanship, and political manipulation replaced common sense.

The sea shell may rail against the surf, but will not prevail.  It will be destroyed trying.  But if it were to pull back, it would survive.   This great nation is some 3,000 miles wide by and 1,800 miles tall.  We have over 12,000 miles of coastline.  And we are going to insist on repeatedly rebuilding in lower-than-sea-level areas which are only a few miles wide?   Any 5^th middle schooler knows better.   And beyond the nonsensical reasons aforesaid, so would any functioning adult.

We must live in flex with nature.  This theory in not new.  The Incas built their temples to move with earthquakes.  After much struggle with their insistence on hard engineering, modern engineers finally came to learn that making buildings flexible made them survivable.

So why would anyone insist on bankrupting America in vain attempt to armor the coast on barrier islands and sub-sea level areas where we  built before we knew better and we thought nature was static?

If we are to make as much of our future as our forebears made for us in our past, we must be come  to led by men not morons.  Leaders who can tell us the truth in straight talk, not hide behind a hundred words in response to a simple questions or a simple situation.

All along the East coast of my home state Florida, people and developers built out on the ocean’s edge of barrier islands.   Hmm,  I wonder why they’re called barrier islands.   A barrier against what?    And barriers like bumpers are meant take the hits.   They move in, they move out.  Back and forth with the flow of nature.  

Yet idiotic politicians take our money and spend billions re-piling up sand on the minuscule 50 foot wide edge between their buildings and the many thousand-mile-wide ocean?   Stupid. Nuts.  Myopic.   Please don’t help yourselves to our wallets so easily.  After all, you didn’t let us stay there for free when things were good, did you.

There is not enough money on earth to repeatedly rebuild shifting coastlines in  America.  There is not enough money in America re repeatedly rebuilt sections of the coastline damaged in floods or eroded in hurricanes.   Those who built there assumed the risk, and enjoyed the beautiful view and the immense profit.   They never let you or I stay there for free at their expense.   It was for their enjoyment not ours.   Many even claimed the beach in front of their house was theirs and you and I  could not enjoy it until we went to court and proved them wrong.   Having absorbed the fantastic benefits, it is now their turn and economic duty to absorb their own loss from the risk they exchanged for their personal benefit.

Those who want America to adapt and thrive must cut out the idiotic politicians who spout stupid slogans and take from all our small pockets to cater to the minute few.  They do this to promote their careers and protect their turf.  It’s like listening to the fool who holds a badge who says “be calm, everything is fine,” while the ship sinks, instead of telling you what the situation is and allowing everyone to adapt their plans to survive and succeed.

It’s time for people to get a grip and not be let around in circles to their collective destruction by fools who know not the way.  Be adaptable.  Be flexible,  Be movable.

Hold fast to America’s core values.  Adapt to the changing terrain to make America thrive.   Assure Americas “surthrival.”

mail@TruthForUs.Com
© www.TruthForUs.com. All rights reserved.
Excerpts of this material may circulated by email with reference to www.TruthForUs.com, but permission is required re-publication, broadcast, rewriting or full posting on other sites.

September 8, 2005.
Hurricane Katrina has again brought to like how evenly divided our National Family has become. About half the people believe in capitalism, and about half in socialism. It almost always breaks along of the lines of 47% feeling one way, 47% feeling the other, and 6% not knowing what they feel one way or the other. And the political parties pretty much state that they stand for these beliefs.
Half think the feds should respect the fact that states and cities are sovereign, elect their officials, and if they want help from other state will ask for it through the vehicle of the federal government. About half believe that the feds should storm into cities and states in prescient anticipation of their making mistakes, the local and state officials are puppets controlled by the feds to be swept aside in a blitzkrieg anytime the feds think they may know more or better than the state officials.
Yet if the feds had invaded without waiting to be legally asked, and Katrina had amounted to nothing, the socialist half would be decrying the feds for acting like a top-down fascist dictatorship or bunch of storm troopers. A fine mess.

© TruthForUs.com. All rights reserved.
Excerpts of this material may circulated by email with reference to www.TruthForUs.com, but permission is required for re-publication, broadcast, rewriting or posting on other sites.

On the Hurricane Katrina Coverage
August/September 2005

I missed all the excellent coverage of the 98% of the blacks and whites that did leave the city.
I missed all the excellent coverage of the squalid refuge camps set up in other states by the 98% of the white and blacks that did leave. (there were none)
It was typical how the media missed the point, focused on the wrong explanation for the event the unfolded, and turned the stupidity of a mayor and governor, and a small percent of the population, into a racial issue instead of an issue of self-reliance and personal competency.
I understand the mayor never bothered to take the carefully-drafted 60+ page emergency plan off the shelf and follow it. Whose to blame for that?

© TruthForUs.com. All rights reserved.
Excerpts of this material may circulated by email with reference to www.TruthForUs.com, but permission is required for re-publication, broadcast, rewriting or posting on other sites.