Some Thoughts After Harvey

It’s heartbreaking to see the video of all the people being displaced by Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath. Just heartbreaking. The images bring to mind those  of the refugees from Syria washing ashore in Greece, utterly displaced in every possible way.

Two years ago, in a cool Budapest park, we heard a talk by a college professor who had started a movement of professors and ordinary folks. Their goal? To protect and to care for the tens of thousands of refugees who’d made their way to Budapest and were stuck in its three huge train stations, nowhere left to go. The Hungarian government—led by racist nationalists—refused to help the refugees, and instead built a wall on the border to keep more of them out. Sound familiar?

Anyway, this gentleman mobilized hundreds,  then thousands of people to create tent cities, provide food and supplies and medical care, and generally provide the basic human necessities to the suffering refugees. A modern saint, and a movement of honorable citizens more moral than their government.

The images from Houston and Corpus Christi and Crosby and Beaumont and the other cities devastated by the storm show ordinary people doing the same thing, time and again. Helping old people onto boats to rescue them from the flood. Establishing shelters and attending to the basic human needs of the thousands of Texans who escaped death with hardly anything of their own.

Meanwhile, the president’s budget proposal cuts disaster relief. Medical research. Funding for flood insurance through FEMA. Funding for FEMA itself. What takes priority? More war in Afghanistan and the Middle East. A wall on our southern border. Redistributing more of our national treasure to the wealthy, who already own so much of it.

There are floods and hurricanes and wildfires. There are earthquakes. There are killing blizzards and murderous heat waves. None of these are under our control, and we all know they are getting worse. As I write, we are surrounded by hundreds of wildfires around the northern Rockies, their smoke utterly obscuring our view. But far more damaging, there are also the moral outrages and the incessant drumbeat of war, the disruptions of our rights and our freedoms, the rallying fascists who feel so emboldened, and the vacating of our values in favor of those who would turn America into an oligarchy.

My ten minutes have passed, and I must stop. So this ends on a sorrowful note. I apologize for that. Next week’s ten-minute post will be the antidote—but perhaps sorrow is not inappropriate for a time like this. Meanwhile, I will look for the hope.