Will Real Americans wake up?
There’s so much horror happening in our government that it’s easy to miss things. Joyce Vance highlighted one of them that I missed yesterday in her newsletter:
The New York Times reported yesterday that a weather service office in Kentucky scrambled to cover overnight forecasting as storms bore down on the region. They no longer have 24-hour staffing. Among the concerns they included in their story:
- The National Weather Service has lost close to 600 employees since the start of the Trump administration, as a result of layoffs and early retirements because the administration demanded “significant cuts”.
- Because of the staffing cuts, some of the 122 weather forecasting offices that operate 24 hours a day, nationwide, each with responsibility for their area, have cut back on the twice-daily launches of weather balloons that collect data and make daily forecasts and forecast models possible.
- An agreement last month between the National Weather Service and its employees’ union warned of “degraded” services.
- Five former directors recently wrote an open letter saying they “feared the cuts had been so deep that lives would soon be endangered.”
The Washington Post put up a map of parts of the country that no longer have 24-hour weather prediction services. In addition to the Kentucky office, there is one in Kansas. None of this makes any sense. I worked in government long enough to be a big fan of cutting waste. But providing lifesaving weather prediction services is about as far from waste as I can imagine. Why derail them? (Unless, of course, you’re planning on creating a private company to provide those services for a fee, but I try not to deal in speculation here.)
Friday night into Saturday, as severe weather, possibly including tornadoes, crossed through Missouri and Kentucky, 21 people were killed.
As she goes to point out, too many people don’t care about what’s going on until it hits their own lives. I would just add that many people are unable or unwilling to make the connection between what their Dear Leader and his henchmen are doing so they chalk it up to fate or Biden or God.
Vance says that they care once it hits them personally but I honestly question that.
These weather events are definitely increasing. It used to be that we’d have them on occasion or have a particularly bad year. Now they happen all the time. Ignoring climate change is terrible price for the right’s devotion to superstition and oil company greed. But now they are destroying the ability of people to cope with what they’ve done, even to the extent of starving the agencies they depend on to warn them about catastrophic weather events coming their way.
People are dying.
The Republican response is to shrug and say, “people always died from these things.” And it’s not just the weather. As a way of excusing the current measles outbreak Trump’s HHS Sec. Bobby Jr like to point out that we only lost a few hundred kids a year from measles before the vaccine, and it was mostly kids who already had health problems — as if they deserved to die.
And sadly, I think we know that a lot of their followers feel the same way. We learned that during the pandemic. We lost 1.2 million people, many of them relatives of the very people who love Dear Leader and his accomplices. They cared more about their cultist beliefs than they care about life and death of human beings. They too shrug and say, “well, people die all the time.”
They will do anything to justify their membership in the cult. At this point I honestly don’t know what will change it. We just have to hope that enough people who are resistant to the charms of Donald Trump outnumber them and that our very rickety electoral system can hold up long enough to defeat them. But the damage in the meantime is cataclysmic.