Natural Disasters on the rise in the United States

Lughnasa                                                                         Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

“This has been a devastating year,” National Weather Service director Jack Hayes said. “Natural disasters are on the rise in the United States,” he noted, including records for heat, tornadoes, floods and fires, and with the bulk of hurricane season still remaining.

So.  The economy has tanked.  The climate has raised hell, at least that’s one explanation that the right wing might find congenial.  Much warmer in that theological realm.  And, it might well have come up first through Texas and Oklahoma, seems possible to me.

Then.  Our political parties stumble over themselves in making ridiculous policy, then bending the knee to the most extreme right wing and  apologizing for not having made worse policy.

If these are the end times, it will be because the Great Spirit got so distracted from laughing at our self-defeating ways that She forgot to run the universe.

Consider that the natural disasters Jack Hayes refers to are probably caused or at least dramatically reinforced by human action.  Then, consider the all to0 human disasters in Washington, Rome and Athens.

If shooting ourselves in our collective feet were an Olympic sport, we’d all be medal winners and hearing our national anthems over and over again.

It is also human that our Asian brothers and sisters, especially the Chinese, see all this as evidence of the inevitability of their rise.  Well.  Probably not.  World history shows the rise and fall of great powers to be a rule, played out over and over again on continent after continent in era after era.  The Qin Dynasty.  Rome.  The Khmer.  The Mughals.  The Macedonians.  The Persians.  The Greeks.  The Maya.  The Aztecs.  At some point in world history others will add, the United States of America, Europe and, yes, even China and Japan and India.

We need to step back, take a look from the long view.  These are neither the worst of times, look at the fate of Carthage, for example, nor are these the best of times, see the Song Dynasty or the Classical Mayan period or Persian culture.

Yes, I find the politics of our time, of this millennium, disheartening in their mean-spiritedness, their lack of charity and compassion, their polarization, but, as Cicero said, “No reign lasts forever.”  It could be that our knuckle-headed policy directions will put paid to the human race, it’s possible, for sure, but history tells me that we’ll muddle through somehow, in spite of ourselves.