Nature has delivered devastating blows to Puerto Rico and Mexico and points north and east. That makes the glorious day here in upstate New York a cause for both rejoicing and reflecting.
Part of the rejoicing is that a flock of Monarch butterflies are flitting around in the goldenrod. There were none last year and I feared they'd gone missing again this year again even though there was plenty of milkweed. But that is gone, making me think the monarchs are late, but lively--positively tipsy on the ever-abundant goldenrod.
Part of the reflecting is the state of survivors in heat, loss, uncertainty. Let us pray for them and send a good chunk of money to a dependable charity unless like my neighbor you've already taken off for relief work.
We have had mostly lovely weather here, too. I know what you mean about it being a cause for both rejoicing and reflection. Our parish had a second collection for hurricane relief a week ago. It was diocese wide. Locally it came in at about 10 times the amount that a second collection usually nets, so I think people are really conscious of the need.
ReplyDeleteWe haven't seen many monarch butterflies yet, but we have certainly been seeing the little Painted Ladies. I guess we are on the migration route this year. They like our sedums.
Due to the shortening days it is still dark now when I go to work. Sometimes I complain about it, but this year I am noticing how beautiful that pre-dawn time is. At the time of the eclipse a lot of people were posting marvelouse pictures of eclipse shadows on the ground seen through tree leaves. So I started noticing the shadows cast on the ground by our tree leaves when it is dark. Also have been noticing the morning star a couple of hand spans above the horizon. I think it is Venus. Makes me think of the Advent hymn, "How Brightly Shines the Morningstar".
Gahh! No "e" on marvelous.
DeleteDreadful heat here in Michigan. Muggy and over 90. So how those people are able to deal with their many catastrophes is unfathomable. Yes, prayers for earthquake and hurricane survivors. I sent money earlier to the Texas Diaper Bank earlier. Can you imagine incontinence or running out of baby diapers in the middle of all that? My Lord.
ReplyDeleteUnreliable thermometer says 88; unreliable weather report says 86, but feels like 90; humidity 49%. There is a very pleasant breeze coming from the direction of Michigan.
ReplyDeleteSo many awful things to imagine: surrounded by floods but the water is undrinkable; night cools things off but there's no light to see anything; ruin and collapse everywhere you turn; lost children, lost parents, missing friends. A bright spot: the story from Mexico City of neighbors rushing to dig out people from a collapsed building and who succeeded in saving people.
I guarantee you that breeze is not coming from Michigan. It is cooling down at night to the mid 60s. Two more days of this, and then Canada gives is back our portion of the Arctic air mass. Down to the mid-60s in time for October, and hope it's safe to take out the window a/c.
DeleteJust got off the phone with my alderman son in Wisconsin who is nursing four wasp bites he got for mowing the grass in shorts yesterday because the temperature was in the 90s. I spent many Septembers in Milwaukee and never saw a wasp this late in the year. This has something to do with cxxxxxe cxxxxe, which I would mention except we are not supposed to "politicize" it.
ReplyDeleteOur collection for the victims was supposed to be last week but was moved to this week because of the uncertainties of last week. That, too, might be related to the unmentionable condition of the atmosphere, but now I am getting as "political" as the National Football League, so I had better stop.
Tom, kind of like vineyards popping up like mushrooms in Nebraska lately. When I was a kid you couldn't grow wine grapes here. The growing season was too short and the winters were too cold. I guess if you have to have effects of cxxxxte chxxxe that's not the worst you could do.
DeleteYes, very buggy. Strange weird creatures especially spiders.
DeleteYes, spiders. I heard Raber scream like a woman. When one crawled in off the screen porch. I deal with the spiders, he deals with the snakes.
DeleteThe topic that cannot be named--cxxxxxe cxxxxe--may explain the warmest, though glorious, day we've had since May. What's to come in December? The black squirrel has a super bushy tale, but will the Monarchs get to Mexico in time? Anyone know the book, "Gotta Go, Gotta Go to Mexico" about the caterpillar who has a near miss for the trip.
DeleteUnfortunately, you can't just drive equipment and goods into Puerto Rico from neighboring states. They need to be rebuilt with hurricane resistant structures (monolithic.com) and HARDENED distributed power grids using solar and wind. Of course, they're already in the hole financially and at the tender mercies of our Repub overlords. More probably, it's time for shock doctrine capitalists.
ReplyDeleteHow will all this destruction and devastation bring people to recalculate the merits of rebuilding? Florida and Texas, or course, are different from the islands that have their own history and "economies."
DeleteIslands are going to be really difficult to rebuild. Roads gone, power gone, building equipment wrecked, water diverted from reservoirs making some places uninhabitable. I fear the "Haiti effect," where one natural disaster makes people more vulnerable to the ensuing ones, and there isn't time or material to recover.
DeleteAnd then disease sets in.
When the property of the rich is destroyed it is merely an opportunity to build a better new place. They have many homes around the world; not using one location for a while is a small inconvenience.
ReplyDeleteWhen the homes of the poor are destroyed they are not as likely to be improved even if they are rebuilt.
I know what has to be done materially for that island. But I fear that there is not enough solidarity or compassion in this country to energize it. I remember the disaster in Haiti. I thought how much could be accomplished if the massive money for the Afghanistan war could be diverted to Haiti. We might actually accomplish SOMETHING. It is all so insane.
ReplyDeleteWell, do-gooders often go wrong places like this. The Clinton Foundation royally messed up relief efforts in Haiti with good intentions but ignorance about political graft and corruption. They also wanted to redesign the country using materials and methods that weren't feasible, and people down there knew it. But the gov slavered all those dollars they could divert and said giddy up.
Delete"Goodbye, Fred Voodoo" is required reading before we go charging off to "save" people.
Funding local entrepreneurs seems to be the best route to economic stability. Hate to come down on the side of the capitalist pigs here, but send cement blocks and builders, and you deprive local brick makers and masons of jobs, and they won't have the $$ to I've in the homes you build. Plus and corrupt govt officials co-opt half the bricks right off the docks for their private residences.
They need raw materials, and we need to be choosy about who gets them.
Puerto Rico is a different situation re government officials; as a U.S. protectorate, we could provide raw materials and train and pay local labor to rebuild. My guess is that Puerto Ricans have the best idea of what they need to do to protect infrastructure from another hit like this, and how to exploit alternative energy in ways that make sense for them.
But the Vietnamistan we have going on in the east is just a total waste of money.
Sounds good to me, stimulating the local economy instead of wholesale importing, but it still takes the green stuff. Also, in the case of Haiti, there's the matter of the then-slaveholding US making Haiti pay France for stealing back their bodies that France legally owned. Whatever they build, it either has to be light and disposable or reinforced concrete shells.
ReplyDelete