Posted by
Sam Heath on Friday, January 12, 2007 8:06:12 PM
It isn’t likely any of you here in my native Kern County had to get up this morning, kindle and light your woodstove, heat a kettle of water, go outside and use the hot water to free the frozen hand pump on your well so as to be sure you would have fresh water throughout the rest of the day. However, this was the routine during this kind of freezing cold weather when I was a boy living on the mining claim here in the Kern River Valley.
A good backlog in the fireplace to keep a fire going through the night was necessary to keep the temps from falling below freezing inside the cabin; otherwise the water we kept for morning use would be frozen. But despite the precaution there were times when this would happen.
Having lived the “pioneer” lifestyle I have no illusions about the hardships and I am very grateful I can now turn on a tap inside my little cottage for water, but how very fragile our lives become when dependent on the modern amenities like electricity; and unlike that shallow hand-dug well on the mining claim should I lose power here there would be no water from this deep well requiring an electric pump. But at that, location would spare me the catastrophe such a thing would be to entire cities like Los Angeles. Los Angeles without power and water! Doesn’t take much imagination to consider the kind of nightmare that would be.
The Katrina disaster should have alerted our government to the dimensions of suffering when such things occur. But I fear all it did was alert us ordinary Americans to how ill-prepared our leadership is to react to any disaster occurring where unlike New York there isn’t the potential loss of political power among the elite. It would be bitterly trite as some have already done to compare what the response would have been had Katrina hit San Francisco.
So many are suffering now in various parts of the country because of ice storms and having to make do to sustain their lives without power. But unless you are well prepared for such an eventuality it can be deadly. And multiplied millions of Americans are simply not prepared for such a thing. I believe our enemies know this, and the money already spent on Caesar Bush’s wars, the money going into the pockets of the wealthy thorough the wars ongoing and the slave labor of illegal aliens subsidized by taxpayers should be spent on America’s infrastructure and preparing for the disasters which are assuredly to come.
Given the dimensions of potential disasters facing America, one can only wonder at the seeming lunacy of a White House and a Congress behaving like the sky will never fall. But it has before, and it will again whether by the design of men or nature.