Weather Watch
Saturday, August 18th, 2007For something that is so essentially global, there’s nothing that brings out Americans’ parochial side like weather. Particularly hurricanes.
I live on the Gulf coast of Florida, and for a week now, we’ve been watching the development of Hurricane Dean. The Weather Channel may take a slightly less biased national view, but the local weather definitely takes the point of view of America First, and the heck with the rest of ‘em.
We watch storm systems form off the coast of Africa. We never care about how they affect weather in Africa–heck, we barely care about Darfur, starvation, genocide in Africa, never mind the weather. Then, to be honest, we root for them to head north in the Atlantic–those folks up North could use some rain, right? Plus, unless they live near riverbanks, the worst they get is power failures (although recent rains showed that in a really hard hit, the New York City subway system could flood…).
Once they clearly head into the Gulf of Mexico, we don’t pay much attention to what Caribbean islands they hit. After 2004, when we got nailed by four big storms (most of which decided they wanted to visit DisneyWorld), we just want them to go ABH–anywhere but here. Katrina changed that, of course; now it’s politically correct for our weathermen to hope they don’t hit New Orleans either.
Right now, it looks like Dean is heading west. Our weathermen are rooting for it to miss Texas and hit Mexico. Guess we send less of our tax money to help out devastated Mexicans than we do to underwater Texans, or something. Or maybe we just want to see FEMA conserve its resources in case the next storm comes here. Or maybe, gee, if Mexico gets a really hard hit, Mother Nature will resolve the immigration issues that Congress doesn’t seem able to.
It’s the old NIMBY syndrome–not in my back yard. When the heck is the average American going to wake up and realize that the whole world is our back yard?
