Hurricanes can be predicted; the devastation they leave behind often cannot.
Hurricane Helene left some people on its path alone, while causing devastating flooding for others. As with any massive storm like this, there were some injuries, even some tragic fatalities, and almost immeasurable damage and property loss; roads washed away, homes smashed or flooded, personal valuables lost forever.
We can say we’re used to such things — there have been such disasters for as long as there has been life on Earth, after all — but every time it happens, there are new victims, new losses, new places to clean or clear, rebuild or abandon.
People a thousand miles read about it in the news, but it does not personally impact them; those in the path of the storm don’t have that luxury. It changes their lives for months or even years, as the lives they built are turned upside down.
We have new risks today, risks we didn’t have a generation or two ago. More people live in these hurricane paths today than before, and many of them are better off than the residents in that zone used to be. And that means that restoring or replacing a modern home with air conditioning and appliances, quality furniture and décor, home theater systems, and SUVs, is more expensive, and a bigger job, than replacing the smaller, simpler homes that used to bear most of the brunt of such events.
We would like to keep politics out of our discussions as we focus on these efforts. In the weeks and months to come, we want to believe that political disagreements only get in the way of progress as we rebuild.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
Local, state, and federal governments have certain, clear responsibilities in these cases. They must provide police to keep the peace and to keep out looters. They must provide fire services when crippled buildings catch fire due to compromised electrical systems (a risk increased by the new abundance of spontaneously combustible electric vehicles). Governments from local to federal must rebuild washed-out roads and bridges, and work with utilities to facilitate the restoration of gas and electricity, water and sewer, garbage collection and postal delivery.
Governments are political. Whether we elected the right people will certainly affect how all this goes.
But the rest is in the hands of the private sector — which is similarly divided into the business world and the nonprofit world. And politics plays a role there too.
Insurance carriers must find a way to pay these massive claims; how our elected officials have managed or mismanaged our economy plays a role in whether the insurers can survive such a disaster.
Once they clean up their homes, the citizens have to go back to work, to keep earning a living, especially now that they will have these new costs to cover. Are their employers still in business, or has this latest hit — after so many other hits over the years — served as the final blow to put the companies out of business? An employer may have suffered from the costs of Obamacare, tax increases, regulatory burdens, and more. Sometimes, a storm like this is the last straw. Imagine having your home destroyed and then finding that you have no job to return to either. This will be the fate of some, perhaps many; government has been pummeling the business sector for years, and with Mother Nature piling on, that might be the death knell for some companies.
Then there are the renovation companies. One might be forgiven if we assume this storm is a windfall for them, and sometimes it is, but not necessarily. As contractors survey the scene, they must evaluate the costs of the needed materials in an age of inflation. Writing a bid for a roofing job, a siding job, or replacing windows or carpeting, porches and piers — all this requires an ability to know he can get the materials, and to assess what they will cost. Not an easy task when the dollar has been taking a pounding for four years due to the economy’s mismanagement by the Biden-Harris regime.
But there are charities, aren’t there? Nonprofits that provide food and clothing, diapers and medicine, even hotel rooms for those displaced, until their houses or apartments can be rebuilt?
Well, now, there’s the rub. The answer there is, yes and no.
Sure, there are charities, more than ever, in some places. But charities exist on donations, and many such donations have dried up in recent years, as DEI/ESG policies have encouraged corporate donors to shift their corporate donations away from traditional charities toward other, more politically-directed nonprofits. Every publicly traded corporation that devotes “a share of its profits” toward greening the planet or empowering some fringe demographic, every company that divests itself of politically incorrect investments in good Israeli stocks, and donates instead to useless green energy startups, has that much less money to give to the organizations that shelter and feed innocent people displaced by storms. If a business is rewarded by the Wall Street funding gurus for contributing to “midnight basketball,” “abortion services,” and building their own wind turbines at company headquarters, they have that much less money for natural disaster relief charities.
In fact, the biggest disaster in the country for the past four years hasn’t been caused by Mother Nature at all, it’s been caused by the abandonment of our borders by Basement Joe Biden and Border Czar Kamala Harris. There’s been a shift in the way that charities work in the United States; too many of them now focus on sheltering and feeding the tens of millions of illegal aliens and “refugees” that clutter our cities, big and small.
Many hotels and motels have no vacancies, because they’re full up with Latin Americans, Africans, Haitians, and Asians, who walked here, drove here, or were flown in by the Biden-Harris regime, over the past four years. Sometimes the federal government pays for this (with our tax dollars), sometimes local or state governments fund it, sometimes charities or local businesses pitch in. Somebody has to get them off the street, right?
For us to survive disasters like this, those disasters must be rare. We need a year or two, or three or four, between major hurricanes and earthquakes, wildfires and floods, to get caught up again, to rebuild our infrastructure and our wallets. We need periods of normalcy, to be able to handle the abnormal.
This regime’s open borders policy has created a permanent disaster situation. It’s not just about the massive crime that this invasion has brought with it. It’s the constant status of buildings full of refugees, 24/7, year after year. We have public buildings — shuttered schools, park districts, airport terminals, even police stations — that have housed dozens or hundreds of illegals each, for months at a time, for four straight years now.
This combination of leftist decisions — flooding the country with destitute, unemployable victims who need constant care, and discouraging the business community from normal charity support by encouraging them to support political charities instead — has contributed to render our nation ill-prepared for any real disaster, the kinds that a modern, once-affluent society expects to be prepared for.
In the end, the best environment for protection of the citizenry after natural disasters is a thriving free market, and that’s exactly what the modern Left — from the politicians in Washington, D.C. to their allies on Wall Street and in pop culture — has been crushing for years.
As we go to the polls to vote in the weeks ahead, we must ask ourselves not which side talks a good game about caring and nurturing, but which side really works to protect the value of the dollar, and to strengthen the business community, and to build a population that can again afford to deal with it whenever Mother Nature strikes a knockout blow?
I’ll gladly take a hard-nosed businessman who can deliver a prosperous economy that can handle the dangers of the modern world, over a dimwitted Marxist hack who regulates the business community to death and throws open the gates to let in five million indigents per year.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his new nonfiction book on the 2024 election, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/09/natural_disasters_and_unnatural_expectations.html
