heavy thread but I want to talk about it a bit. CW mentions of implied death. This 'hurricane season' thing, let's talk about it.
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I lived in Fort Myers, Florida for ~35 years. Fort Myers is in Southwest Florida, an area that is a geographical magnet for tropical disasters. Just that city alone sees some degree of hurricane hit every 2.35 years.
Southwest Florida is not all snowbirds, partiers, MAGAts, whatever convenient excuse people make to justify their righteousness in them having their lives potentially up-ended (or just ended) every potentially 2.35 years.
Even with literal round-the-clock coverage and support when these storms roll in, the tolls are shocking. I remember driving to see a family member's house after Charley hit in 2004. We got access to the area early because they had a home there, and we were warned to not look around too much as we drove. That warning was, as we found out, because while many crews were performing S&R, the poorer areas and trailer parks in Charlotte Harbor were being treated by a cleanup crew, just scrambling to remove blood and other things that I won't mention from any remaining structures/trees.
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When storms came, those of us with the least means often meant we stayed no matter what. Many codes of conduct for employment in SWFL had clauses stating you're not supposed to be able to lose a job from fleeing from a disaster - but everyone who lived there knew that was a lie, and they'd find a way to make you pay for leaving. If you were able to evacuate, free bus routes only started in the bigger parts of cities and only went so far.
On top of that, the median age in Charlotte Park, one of the areas most affected by that storm, is 69.8 years old. The average salary? $27,785. That area of Florida is also staggeringly car-dependent, scoring a pathetic average of 28/100 in combined walk/bus usefulness. (Census data and Walk Score taken around 2023 on average.)
All this is to say - people don't get out.
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You'd come back to work, if you were lucky enough to have work off, and someone would still be missing. Maybe not a coworker, but a parent, distant relative, pet, livelihood, something, someone. You'd measure life differently as it was before the storm and after it, even if you weren't directly affected, even if there "aren't that many deaths" as people love to claim for some obscene reason, like a collective of smaller cities isn't going to feel deaths in the hundreds per storm in their community and far more lives affected.
All of this is with, I will remind you, round-the-clock coverage of these storms, often with a full month of preparedness taken into consideration. Anything less than this kind of response and our death tolls will look like they did before the 70s again - in the thousands, not hundreds, per storm. And any gutting of FEMA is a gutting of direct, rapid aid to the people most hurt by these storms. Say what you will about government efficiency as a whole, but FEMA gets checks into bank accounts in weeks, sometimes days after storms, to people affected in all manner and priority of ways. Lives are saved by this.
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So, with all that, here's the point I'm ultimately trying to make:
If you think the gutting of the NOAA and FEMA is sensible spend reduction, or, even worse, some kind of blessing for the people you assume to "deserve it",
If you don't think that the aim of this administration is anything less, with the knowledge had on these storms, than to actively kill constituents,
If you think that the once-acting head of FEMA being ousted for not kissing the ring and replaced by someone who apparently doesn't know about the US's hurricane season (???) is a "partisan issue", or is justified as the administration claimed FEMA "use[d] “woke” ideologies to appropriate funds", or
If you think now is the time to ridicule anyone for not being able to just "pack up and leave",
I'd better see your ass on the Volunteer Florida website or local food bank's page this hurricane season peak donating your time and/or money to make it right.
Disasters are not a partisan issue. They are a human issue.
Thanks for reading. -L