The Eye of the Storm That Sees Us All

[WilliamPitt]

Floodwaters under the Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive in the Manhattan
borough of New York, October 29, 2012. (Photo: Ruth Fremson / The New York Times)

The Eye of the Storm That Sees Us All
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Tuesday 30 October 2012

It is Monday afternoon in the city of Boston as I write this, and Hurricane Sandy has begun to flex her considerable muscles even here. Atlantic City is awash in many places, Hoboken is flooding, the Esplanade at Battery Park in New York City is basically underwater, and the worst of the storm is still hours away. Farther south, the eastern seaboard is taking a fearsome beating where Sandy prepares to make direct landfall.

I am sitting here with my whiskey and my wife and my fat cat and my upstairs neighbor who almost hit a cop car when he backed out of the driveway to get smokes, we're all listening to the wind shake the house, and contemplating the ruthless sense of humor of Fate.

Crazy weather - the one all-important topic that has been entirely ignored by both major presidential campaigns - is about to cause billions of dollars in damage along the East Coast, and may very well wind up playing merry hell with the upcoming election.

Funny like a kick in the head.

Remember this summer? All the insane weather everywhere that eventually caused even the most strident climate-change deniers to flee for cover and start hoarding canned goods? Remember when Greenland melted? Remember all the articles about the upside of the accelerating climate disaster happening all around us, vis a vis new shipping lanes and mining possibilities in all the places where there used to be ice?

Remember the drought?

Rivaling the Dust Bowl of the Depression era, the 2012 drought has impacted food production in America across the board, causing food prices to spike in a way that has been felt by everyone not rich enough to laugh off the price of a gallon of milk. More than anything else, it was the drought that brought home the reality of climate change to Americans this past summer.

And now? Poof, like it never happened.

(snip)

The climate is coming down around our ears, and neither big-dollar candidate has felt compelled to date to deign to bring it up, because this is America. We're a funny lot, in that we must be led to the edge of the precipice and then kicked in the back before saying, "Wow, this is dangerous, we should do something about this!"

The lights just flickered, and the wind is picking up, so I have to submit this before everything shuts down.

A metaphor, that.

The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12404-the-eye-of-the-storm-that-sees-us-all

[HopeHoops]

1. Actually, the eye is directly over my house. I'm waiting for the tail side to come through.

[WilliamPitt]

2. Up