Discussion about this post

Juan Matute's avatar
Mari's avatar

I'm of the old and "vulnerable" cohort and have ventured outdoors only to go to the grocery store during the old folks hours. Living as a hermit is hard but with the election of my lifetime as a motivator I will persist. My sense is voting is not an option. I WILL vote by mail if possible, dropping my ballot off in a secure dropbox (optimal), but if necessary will stand in line for however long it takes even if the result is that voting in person kills me. At this juncture not voting will also kill me. It is now just a matter of choosing which is the greater risk. Sitting on my old butt is not the way I choose to go.

Expand full comment
Ellie Kona's avatar

Iowa derecho:

My heart goes out to the people of Iowa, for dealing with the immediate challenges of how loss of electric power affects getting food, shelter, gas, money, roads…and then the longer term challenges of the devastation to the crops, agricultural infrastructure, and therefore the local economy. Four people died.

I had to look up “derecho:” sustained straight-lined winds; some were over 100 miles per hour. This devastation happened this past Monday, August 10, when I, for one, was oblivious. Instead I was focused on response to trump’s golf club executive order/memorandums and Mount Rushmore. Then news of USPS getting gutted and Kamala Harris selected for the Biden ticket clouded needs of aid to these regions impacted by the derecho.

Not surprisingly, we have to keep both a micro and macro perspective. In addition to the needs of the people on the ground in the here and now, there is the climate:

“Corn plays a significant role in Iowa’s climate. By releasing water into the atmosphere in a process called evapotranspiration, it has been shown to increase the dew point and subsequently the humidity. That can lead to higher heat indexes during heat waves, and it can also contribute to severe thunderstorms.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/08/12/iowa-derecho-corn-damage/

Echoes of the Dust Bowl? The U.S. government and Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced Native Americans onto reservations in what are now the Plains states with Oklahoma at the center. Then the Dawes Act of 1887 subdivided the reservations into family-held allotments compacted onto about one third of the tribes’ previous land holdings and created “surplus” lands available for purchase by non-Natives. Subsequent exploitations opened more and more of the land for European-American settlers from the East and ex-slaves. Heather could detail this history very well. Fast forward to the fact that the settlers did not know what they were doing, and the land became over-grazed and over-cultivated, resulting in widespread erosion. Then came drought and waves of dust storms that caused crop failure, deaths of cattle and people, and loss of livelihood.

When Heather has “spare time,” maybe we can look forward to another set of lessons learned to be taken up by a caring federal government, which tragically at the moment is a contradiction in terms. A Biden administration, Congress, and We the People have so much work to do.

Expand full comment
157 more comments...

No posts