Let's invade Puerto Rico

29Sep2017

People are hurting. Buildings are collapsed, infrastructure is broken, communication is spotty at best. The situation in Puerto Rico a week after it was devastated by a hurricane is desperate. These are Americans suffering. More to the point, these are human beings – mothers, fathers and children and aunties and grands without the necessities of life. Butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers without the infrastructure and supplies they need to help their communities get back on their feet.

The airport went days without flights and still isn’t up to snuff because of problems with the radar and traffic control equipment and yet, we have the capability to invade a foreign land and stand up a brand-new airport from jungle in a few days’ time. But we wouldn’t have had to do even that – the runways in Puerto Rico were intact, we just needed to bring in the machines and a mobile power plant, of which we have plenty.

People are starving while our warehouses are full of MREs. People have no safe drinking water while we have air-deployable water plants sitting on the ground. 

Hospitals struggle to keep their pre-hurricane patients alive and then to deal with the newly injured and yet, a week later the largest hospital ship in the world – 1000 beds, capable of operating independent of shore power, with a helipad and its own boats for moving patients and caregivers in and out- was not authorized to move for several days and only now is getting under way for the island.

Emergency services are overwhelmed in large part because the first responders are at home caring for their own families. And yet our reserves of military police have not been mobilized to help.

Trucks full of relief supplies sit unmanned at the docks even though our Army and Marines have organic transportation units with qualified equipment operators who could be there driving within a few hours.

We invaded Grenada six days after Maurice Bishop’s death and that involved planning and practicing an armed attack. Does it not seem we could have ‘invaded’ Puerto Rico – our own sovereign territory, with no need for artillery preparation -  even more quickly?

When you have all the materials and capability standing at the ready and you fail to respond, it’s not ‘good news’ as our DHS Secretary said. And the problem isn’t ‘big water, ocean water,’ as her idiot boss proclaimed. It is unconscionable that Puerto Rico might have been better off had we invaded rather than being hit by a natural disaster and then depending upon us for assistance.

There was a way. We just didn’t have the will. And we should all feel ashamed. 

Sad words and phrases

I came across an item in the webisphere today with the morbid title: “10 of the Saddest Words (or Phrases) in the English Language.”

Their list included: back to school, goodbye, heartbroken, if only, might have been, lonely, love (in reference to the unrequited variety, one might assume), melancholy, terminal, and perhaps my fave, ‘what party?’

I’ll admit that some of these words and phrases do seem unalterably sad. Melancholy, for example. Not sure how one might put a positive spin on melancholy. The sheer Eeyoreness of the word condemns it to the realm of the other-than-mirthful.

Some terms from the list require context to frame their claim on misery. ‘Back to school’ is not always and evermore a sad concept, is it? I said, is it? Might-have-been’s position depends on the nature of the ideas immediately preceding or following – the ‘this’ that might have been.

Anyway, there certainly are sad words and phrases in our lexicon. One of the saddest for me is ‘I wish I’d known.’ While I suppose there are less-sad contexts for it (If I’d known you were coming I’d have baked a cake), in my world this phrase is usually associated with missed chances to do better, be better, find better.

I wish I’d known then what I know now. Okay, fairly mild.

I wish I’d known (s)he liked me. Less mild, heading for heartbroken.

I wish I’d known in time to stop him/her.  Ew, let’s not go there.

Sometimes ‘I could have’ or ‘I should have’ can pull my strings. But for me, there’s no phrase quite as sad as ‘I wish I’d known.’

Da haps, today

I spent an hour or two today going through some of my old attempts at writing. Essays, stories, some poetry, what have you. Some of it was good, some less so but I was a bit taken aback to realize how long I’ve been writing on a regular basis.

Mary is down in the laundry room / downstairs restroom laying a new floor. I wonder how many times I’ve marveled at the fact that I lucked into marrying a women who’s not afraid to get her hands dirty. She really is a good egg, but don’t tell her I said that. I wouldn’t want her to get a swelled head.

Daughter One is recovering from a medical procedure and thankful for a boyfriend who hovers by her to make sure she has what she needs.

Two and Da Boy are planning their wedding.

One of my friends is have her hard work directing a play validated by critics. Those of us who have known her since Gawd was a baby always knew she was a director at heart.

The new front lawn goes in tomorrow and I don’t have to do the grunt labor – score! Okay, I did have to dig and fill the French drain to reroute roof water from the new lawn but I did that last weekend so it no longer counts.

Onshore breezes have finally driven the clouds of smoke from fires to the East away from us.

Two dogs asleep within nine feet of where I sit.

I can’t complain.

Neighbors

Brigitte passed away last week ‘after a long illness,’ as they say. Leaving behind Bruno, two daughters and a granddaughter.

The daughters and the grand left for home yesterday, so now Bruno is alone in his house. Alone with her clothes and toiletries. Alone with the dishes and gardening tools they used together. Alone with the car they drove to church together each Sunday morning.

Mostly, alone with the memories they shared and of which he will now be sole caretaker.

They met in Germany during the time of Hitler and fled to this country to make their lives, he as an engineer for Boeing, she as mother and wife and matriarch.

Their offspring had moved away, landing in Oregon – far enough but still within reach of a day trip. The elders maintained a vacation house near the Washington shore which they hadn’t visited so often of late as she became increasingly ill.

He kept bees and she her garden, two halves of a whole. They enjoyed our annual Christmas light extravaganza; Brigitte really enjoyed one particular piece, so we always placed it facing her kitchen window.

I built a custom entertainment center for them once, to his wildly over-engineered drawings. The thing weighed a ton and moving it from my garage shop to his living room was a neighborhood project. In payment, he gave me a wonderfully figured, richly colored board of walnut for which I’ve yet to find the perfect use. When we had the van with the misbehaving tail light switch, he would notice during his nightly rounds and call so we could turn it off and thus avoid a dead battery in the morning. I gave him some of my cut up dead-fall wood for his stove from time to time.

We lived across the street for (twenty-four?) years and we were comfortable with but not especially attuned to the rhythms of each other’s lives. We were good neighbors, if good means mostly respecting privacy.

This is pretty much all we know about Bruno and Brigitte. They were the neighborhood watchdogs who did not care for being watched, themselves.

And now, she’s gone and his life is so changed while ours goes on pretty much as before. 

Jambalaya

I’m having jambalaya for lunch.

I’ve never had it before, at least, not that I can recall. (I know, I know, what have I been eating all these years, right?)

Seems that of late I’m eating lots of things that are new to me. Not necessarily because I’m suddenly overcome with a yen for gustatorial adventurousness. No, it’s more because daughters mine have been stretching their horizons and encouraging Mary and me to join them in their explorations.

I’m sort of screwed by my own parenting style. We always encouraged our daughters to expand said horizons. I just never thought their explorations would come back on me like this.

You see, I’m sort of your standard meat-fish-poultry-taters-rice-bread-chocolate kind of guy. Not big on most veggies and particularly non-fond of too much spice or peppers of the hot varieties. And not a fan of trying new recipes.

Our daughters are changing all that. Especially One. She has become quite the chef and Mary and I get to reap the benefits.

I’m having jambalaya for lunch.

Can’t wait.

I think…