Blame game over Harvey ‘epic’
Sometimes 50 inches of ‘stuff’ just happens
The Salon.com headline said it all:
“Trump just flunked his first natural disaster test.”
Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas, left dozens dead in its wake, and Donald Trump is at fault.
Except ... that headline appeared more than a day before Harvey made landfall. According to the liberals at Salon, the fact Trump was still sending out less-thanpresidential tweets as Harvey headed toward shore was reason enough to find fault.
They’re hardly alone. Listen to MSNBC long enough and you’d believe Hurricane Harvey was sparked by a tropical wave created when the Trump administration left the Paris Climate Accords.
And if it’s not Trump’s fault, it’s the entire GOP: The Texas Tribune’s Neena Sajita blamed the unprecedented storm damage on the fact that Texas Republicans don’t back climatechange initiatives.
“Local officials in Houston didn’t have any plans to study the effects of climate change in the city,” she charged.
Newsweek magazine blames small-government libertarianism (“Houston Is Drowning — In Its Freedom From Regulations”), while the libertarian publication Reason blames government subsidized flood insurance for encouraging building in flood plains (“Hurricane Harvey and the National Flood Insurance Fiasco”).
Some people are blaming greedy developers for overbuilding. Lots of people are blaming Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner for urging citizens not to evacuate. At least one Florida professor has been fired for blaming Harvey’s carnage on “instant karma” because Texas voters backed Trump.
And then there’s David Leonhardt of The New York Times who blames, well, everybody: “Harvey, the Storm That Humans Helped Cause.”
To which I reply: Hurricanes Happen.
The Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 hit New England with a 22-foot storm surge, higher than Harvey’s. The 1938 hurricane killed almost 700 New Englanders and wiped entire towns off the map. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 killed an estimated 12,000 people — the deadliest natural disaster to strike the United States.
Now we have Harvey, dumping more rain in a week than Houston typically gets in a year, and the Blame Brigades demand “something must be done!” What, exactly? Here’s the deal: There is no government program that can prevent suffering and sorrow when 50 inches of rain fall out of the sky in five days. It’s just gonna happen.
You know what else happens? Addiction. It doesn’t matter if we spend a gazillion dollars on government programs (which I think was an actual number in a George W. Bush budget), New Hampshire will have opioid addicts. The human mind craves pleasure. That’s not a “problem,” that’s a fact of nature.
The list goes on: Stupid happens, no matter how many tax dollars we dump on schools. Crime happens no matter how many cops we hire. Sickness happens, whether we implement health savings accounts or single payer. It’s called “life.” And sometimes it sucks.
Grownups understand this. The “average American,” alas, does not.
The need to find fault for things beyond our control is both immature and expensive. It stops smart policies — like school choice or market-driven health care reforms — that make things better but don’t solve
problem. If your policy doesn’t stop every crime or prevent every flood then it’s unfair. “It’s your fault!”
This brand of thinking assumes the existence of some magic idea or amount of money that can turn human existence from the Darwinian struggle it is into the Disney movie millennials imagine it can be. And the pursuit of this utopia is often a wildly expensive waste of time.
The lesson: Donate to the Red Cross, volunteer to help your neighbors and enjoy every precious moment of life you can. But never forget:
Stuff Happens. Sometimes 50 inches at a time.