Starving Biafrans, flooded-out Bangladeshis were in the news when I was a kid

In fact we were always being asked to donate to this drought/famine or disaster or another all over the under-developed world.

Schools I attended, regularly collected money to help these people.

They lived in a precarious part of the world..devoid of stable governments, and seemingly right in the path of one disaster after another.

Our teachers always reminded us how lucky we were to live in a peaceful place with the ability to protect us from famines, and how lucky we were to have people to help us get over things like tornadoes & hurricanes, fires, floods and all the other possibilities.


What separated us from those Biafrans & Bangladeshis (and all the others we donated to) was our INFRASTRUCTURE and government.

"Weather" is everywhere, and so is the possibility of fires & local disasters, but we had the satisfaction of knowing that "somebody" would always be there to help us....without having to go begging to the rest of the world for handouts.

We have seen, quite recently, what happens when no one comes to help (see Haiti earthquake), and to some degree New Orleans after Katrina. Haiti has more or less been left to the celebrities who try their best to help and the NGOs who have been trying to help forever, with little success. Their government is unable/unwilling to do what needs to be done.

Today on MSNBC, there was a graphic shown that represented dollar amounts for "repairs" after Katrina..$106 Billion..but then I wondered how much that would be if New Orleans had actually BEEN "restored".. Seven long years after the fact, there are still large swaths of land that look like it happened weeks ago.

What's different about "Sandy", is that it involved 1/5 or more of our population, and the lack of attention to our aging/stressed infrastructure is coming into a greater focus for us all..

I'm sure the subway system is great, BUT it's ONE HUNDRED & EIGHT years old.. Our "wires" are still basically strung from "poles" above ground, like they were when we first got widespread electrification..and these poles+wires are toppled with regularity by falling trees.

Too many of the communities built within the last 50 years or so have probably been built way too close to coastlines. (and out here, in fire-prone, fragile canyons & hillsides)

Money always changes hands when variances are needed, and developers who really really really want to build in areas that probably would be best left as public beachfront parks and open access to all, will almost always find the right pockets to line with cash in order to get those variances.

With ferocious storms seeming to be on the rise . and the cost of repairing damages, only to put the same people (or new, richer ones) into harms way over and over again, it seems to me that there needs to be some serious attention paid to what is in the best interest of the general public...and to the extreme costs of pretending that things are the same as they "used to be"..

Politicians of all "flavors" seem to be suddenly worried about handing down debt to "the children", but what's worse may just be handing down a wrecked, inefficient infrastructure to them in a more "dangerous" and fragile world..