Tornado Photos from Indiana

Warning: Mark Mabry's photo essay may bring tears to your eyes...

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/beck-photographer-snaps-stunning-pictures-of-henryville-disaster/

However, this web site has to disagree with the comment from "Virginia Joe." I agree with him that if the tornado had hit Washington, D.C., with all the crowding that city's accepted since the turn of the century, we would see a lot of wailing for federal aid. Because it happened in Indiana, Kentucky, and other parts of the Midwest, extending as far east as Lee County (at the easternmost tip of Virginia), we're seeing private relief efforts at work.

I even agree that there are Washingtonians who, though apparently able to pitch in after a minor weather event like one of the heavy snows Washingtonians tend to call "blizzards," prefer to sit around wailing. I saw some of that when I was living there. Very annoying, those people can be. You spend hours clearing snow on your street, go in and see an ambulance blocked by snow and fallen trees on the next street, and then in the next morning's Post is a letter from someone who thinks the government ought to have cleared his street, and he doesn't even describe his disability.

But although these whiny goldbricks are certainly very undesirable neighbors, I don't think they're what we saw in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. What I saw was a disaster whose effects were multiplied exponentially by population density.

The difference between the "Let's start cleaning up and rebuilding today" that follows a tornado, and the "People will be unable to return to their homes for weeks" that follows a flood, has more to do with the physical effects of the disaster. What Mark Mabry's documenting in Indiana is the reaction of people who can go straight to work, because their wrecked houses aren't under water.

The difference between the "gratitude" people are showing to Mark Mabry, or the energy with which Washington went back to work on September 12, 2001, or the neighborliness with which my neighbors weathered the Clinchport Flood in 1977, and the horrors we all watched after Hurricane Katrina, is that people living at normal population density were able to get away from their damaged homes. Even those who are staying in shelters aren't living in the kind of appalling conditions that were documented in New Orleans.

Because the population density of Arlington was sustainable as of 2001, it was possible for Arlington to put out the fire in the damaged wing of the Pentagon--noting that the damaged wing was used for storage--with no harm done to people even in other parts of the same building. Because the population density of New York had reached toxic levels long before 2001, the fires around the Towers smoldered for months.

There are whiny, annoyingly stupid people on whom the blessing of an able body is wasted in Virginia. There are sensible, energetic, and even competent construction workers in New Orleans, and obviously in New York--the Towers wouldn't have stood for as long as they did if there hadn't been excellent construction workers in New York.

However, when only dozens of people are displaced at the same time, shelter conditions don't automatically become intolerable; the energetic back-to-work mood prevails, and visitors to the area feel hope in the air. When millions are displaced at the same time, crowded shelters become as deadly as the conditions people were trying to escape; hopelessness prevails, and visitors feel horror.

Is it possible that the Red Cross and other rescue agencies are receiving donations in excess of the actual need, calling for storage bins to stockpile more emergency supplies rather than for replenishment of their supplies themselves? I'd believe it. Tornados blaze narrow trails, and in a healthy, sparsely populated area of a rich country, the real emergency is likely to involve relatively few people.

The people who talked to Mark Mabry have solid reasons to feel grateful. Neither their reasons nor their gratitude seems to me likely to depend on where they fitted into the old twentieth-century political spectrum. But they'd do well to consider how much their reasons and their gratitude have to do with what Wendell Berry correctly predicted would be the real political issue of this century--the environment, and humans' place in it.

Do we want to try to fit ourselves into a genuinely sustainable (and healthy and enjoyable) mostly-rural environment (the new "conservative" position)? Or would we rather let ourselves be packed into toxic urban environments ("Agenda 21," the new position favored by those who basically want there to be "one world" government run by and for themselves)? In a rural environment, the response to a weather disaster looks like what Mark Mabry photographed. In an urban environment, it looks more like what the media showed us of New York and New Orleans.

What can generally be identified as the New Left, or "Agenda 21," or anti-humankind, position is what Old Left dinosaur Mike Malloy spewed on his radio show, as reported by Jonathon Seidl:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/liberal-radio-host-mocks-storm-victims-their-god-keeps-smashing-them-into-little-grease-spots/

As an Irish-American, I find it deeply offensive that this jerk is using an Irish name...but no, Malloy, a casual review of the disasters the United States has survived recently will show that it's your "god," or more properly your "Agenda," that's smashing masses of human beings into little grease spots. The weather has, temporarily, turned Henryville, Indiana, into a close facsimile of a garbage dump, but the people there are alive and cleaning up.