rainydaynews

You know those forwarded emails you get that noboyd really knows the origin of?  I got one yesterday that made me thin, a lot, so I decided to share it with you.

The Email:

As you watch the flooding in the Midwest, have you noticed that there

People who could sandbagged and others packed trucks to move their precious belongings to higher ground. Not one called for Coast Guard helicopters to rescue them, though there were a few rescued from levees that broke while they were trying to help themselves.

About a week ago, the Supreme Court released a ruling that I thought was a bit, well, out there.  They decided that the military prisoners at Guantanimo Bay had the right to petition the American civilian courts and be granted the same rightrs as American citizens.

I could have understood letting them have POW rights, or letting them complain to the United Nations about their treatment at the hands of the American military, but letting them whine to judges? That seemed a little bit off.

Then, today, the Supreme Court issued two ruling proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that at least five justices are out of their collective minds. In one case, the court rules that no matter how heinous the crime, unless it involves killing someone, the death penalty is too extreme a punishment; in the other, it ruled that Exxon Mobile should not have to pay $2.5 billion in civil punitive damages for the Exxon Valdez spill. Instead, the oil giant would ahve to pay just $500 million in punitive damages.

In some ways, the judgment agaisnt Exxon makes sense. The oil company has already shelled out more than $2 billion to clean up the spill and $1 billion in other court fines. On the other hand, at a time when the American people are largely enraged with big oil, reducing the punitive, that is punishment damages, to one tenth what the trial court originally granted is like a slap in the face of Americans everywhere.

The decision in the death penalty case is worse. A man in Louisiana raped his 8-year-old stepdaugher, causing grevious medical harm, including permanent damage to the child. Justice Kennedy, writing for the court, called the rape a horrible event. But the damage done to that child was not as important as if he had simply completed what he started and killed her.

Apparently, her life long physical and emotional trauma is not worth as much as her life. If he had simply killed her or the medical professionals who gave her trauma care had been slightly less efficient at saving her life and stopping the internal bleeding, her sttacked could be put to death. But since he stopped short and called paramedics, telling them his little girl had “just become a woman”, he gets to live. And she has to go on knowing that the value of her life, the quality of it, was less important thant he life of this maniac.

This is yet another blow to the American death penalty and strikes down laws in 8 states which allowed the death penalty in the case of rape. Now, the court has decided that it has only to protect the actual life of the victim, not the quality of it. So much for that young woman’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!

Since when do we believe that the rights of the accused should outweigh the rights of the victim? And, what the hell is wrong with the Supreme Court?

Sometimes the idiocy of my local newspaper amazes me to no end. I think they must have monkeys as copy editors or at least as the people who write headlines.

Today, the Sunday paper had a banner headline that read, “Flooding not horrific, but one dead locally”. Ummm, okay, I know what they meant, really I do, but I am assuming that the family of the young woman who is presumed to have drowned in the flood waters of the Big Muddy River finds the flooding horrific indeed.

Worse yet for her family is that subhead which reads, “Woman Drives into Big Muddy Floodwaters.” Now, I read the story and I know that what the headline says in not exactly what police report probably happened. According to the police report, the young woman, 28, lost control of her vehicle on a curve and the vehicle flipped as it left the roadway and ended top down, submerged in the flood-swollen river. That’s a bit different than “Woman drives into floodwaters.” Driving into floodwaters implies that the woman saw the floodwaters and deliberate drove, as in steered, guided and caused to happen, her vehicle into the river.

I am, for her family, horrified at this headline. I am also horrified for the profession of journalism. This stupid and innaccurate headline implies that the woman is dead as a result of her own intended action rather than revealing that she was trapped in the vehicle and rescuers were unable to get her out for more than 15 minutes. She died before she could be transported to a St. Louis trauma center.

Her family is having to deal with this horrible incident and the local newspaper implies that the victim is somehow to blame.

In all honesty, I suspect the copy editor who wrote the headline is not really to blame. I blame the newspaper. The story was written minutes before the paper’s midnight deadline and had to be added at the last minute to the front page. Worse yet, this particular newspaper is well known for understaffing its copy desk and requiring young and under paid and inexperienced editors to work 50 or 60 hour weeks.

And, I blame journalism instructors. At many universities, future journalists have one or maybe two writing classes in meeting their course requirements. They are never taught to examine the meaning of a word–specific meaning, not just connotation–before putting it into a headline.

The editor who wrote that the flooding was not horrific, certainly meant that the flooding did not reach the devastating levels of the 1993 Great Flood, but that does not mean it is not horrible to those who suffer through it. Even if only one house is flooded, one business destroyed, or one life lost, the flooding is horrific to the people it affects. The phrasing makes the editor who wrote it appear callous and naive.

Complicating the offensive nature of the front page headline was a similarly poor headline in the inside section of the paper, “Man dead after being run over”. At least in this case, the headline is accurate. The man was lying in the road and run over with a vehicle.

However, accuracy does not excuse crassness or insensitivity. Again, this man had a family. I’m sure the abrupt and heartless nature of the headline does not ease their grief.

Perhaps the Southern Illinoisan should consider some basic compassion training for their headline writers as well as some basic grammar classes. Clearly, they could use both.

A few years ago, I began listening to Rush Limbaugh on my lunch hour. At first, I felt the need to justify it to my friends, pointing out that I thought it was good to know your enemy. Now, I am perfectly comfortable simply stating I listen to Rush.

Do I agree with him?  Only about 30 percent of the time.

But I do listen and now, after a few years of listening, I finally get why he rules talk radio. Rush Limbaugh is rational!

I know, I know, you diehard liberals have trouble with that statement. I did too. That’s why it took me so long to write it, but it is true.

He is rational. He’s just not right.

Rush actually believes what he says. I personally believe there are some fundamental flaws in his belief system, but his rhetoric flows logically from those beliefs. I can say this because I have listened to other right wing talk radio and know they simple like to talk to ehar their own voices. Some like to stir up trouble for trouble’s sake. Some, make hugely controversial statements just to get ratings.

Rush doesn’t do that. He actually believes that when Michael J. Fox started making political ads, he opened himself up for criticism of those ads. Logical and accurate.

He believes that if there were a “Whitey” tape about Michele Obama, it would have been used already. Sure, he talked about it –  for one day and then he dropped it because there was no evidence of it. He rarely takes things out of context, maybe because he has it done to him so often. He has not harped on the Obamas and campaigned actively to create a “Stop ____ Express.” 

Unlike his fellow talk show hosts, Rush actually talks about the issues and this is where I find myself on occasion agreeing with him. Sometimes, we agree for different reasons, but the conclusions we reach are similar. He has problems with John McCain because he has been willing to abandon the core of his party and therefore core beliefs. Ultimately, he doesn’t trust the man. I have the same issue, sort of. I believe that McCain is willing to bend the rules to suit himself and will do whatever it takes to win. He reminds me of Bill Clinton. Smarmy.

Rush questions Obama’s experience and what he has accomplished. I would argue that sometimes it is better to have no legislative credits to your name than to have bad legislative credits. Besides, Rush knows as well as I do that junior senators do no pass legislation their first term in the Senate. It simply isn’[t done. Even if Obama came up with the best solution to every problem facing the world today, not a single one fo them would have passed the Senate in his name before he announced his cadidacy for the Presidency. Now, it might, but it would be a symbolic passage just to make him look good and we all know it.

Generally, the problem with most right-wing talk show hosts is that they are perfectly willing to ignore facts that are inconsistent with their world view. Rush doesn’t. He will take the time to attempt to discredit the fact or bend it to his world view. While I may not agree with his conclusions, I at least respect the man as an orator.

His competitors in talk radio don’t get it. They can insight the listeners to call and argue and maybe even drive up ratings, but Rush has the ability to change people’s minds.

It’s too bad the liberal side of politics has yet to be able to find a man who can logically and charismatically present our side of the argument.

As the general election starts to take shape, there is a growing war between Barack Obama and John McCain on very substantive issues which are very integral to the election. The problem is that on many of these issues the voters are being left with a perception that might not have anything to do with the reality.

The perception that the Republican Party is attempting to sell is that John McCain is a war hero and will be tough on terrorism. If you believe them, the nation will be more secure with a former POW and Naval pilot at the helm than with Obama.

Why? Well, the Republican National Committee would argue that it should be obvious. Barack is against the war. He has said he will, gasp!, meet with the leaders of other countries, even ones that are not our friends. Historically, not all great war time leaders were pro-war or even veterans. In fact, most great leaders in war time had the role thrust upon them, kind of like George W. Bush. Weren’t expecting that analogy, were ya?

The simple truth is that being former military does not mean you are absolutely better to run the American War on Terror. After all, the current president is a veteran and he sort of bungled the war effort, didn’t he?  Ronald Reagan, a diplomat and a charismatic man with no military history, won the Cold War.

Added to that are the quiet questions about McCain’s time as a POW. Like the accusations against John Kerry, that he was not military leader he claimed to be, there are accusation that McCain is not the POW hero he claims to be. The poster here, who signs his name, first made the accusations about McCain in 1999. This is not a new attack, but it does seem to be something we ought to know about the man who would be king.

The perception is that Barack is naive and uninformed about international politics, but the reality is that he has lived it. As a child of many cultures, he has travelled much of the world and understands the diplomacy aspect of international relations. As near as I can tell, the only diplomacy McCain has learned is to “carry a big stick”. He forgot he “walk softly” portion of the adage.

Another portion of the perception versus reality game taking place is the quiet and deliberate, hushed tones even, attack on Obama.  Every effort is made to portray him and his family as racist while people in the comfort of their own homes or voting booths decide they just can’t vote for a black man for president.

And they have been so sly about it, clouding the issue as a question of religion. His father was Muslim, he spent some time in a Muslim school, he’s really a Muslim. The implication and the perception that hate mongers want people to be left with is that Obama is the same sort of extremist as those who flew planes into the World Trade Center. We can’t come right out and say don’t vote for him because he’s black, so we stage whisper “Muslim” and point behind his back. I guess this is okay, becuase really, how many white Muslims do you know?

I heard a woman named Asma Barlas speak once about the perception that white Western women have of Muslim women, a perception that is again not reality. As a white Western woman, it was uncomfortable to hear, but her argument made sense. We want to believe that Muslim women are oppressed so that we can believe we are superior to them. In the same way, Americans seem to need to believe that all Muslims are evil, so that we can maintain some sort of superiority.

In reality, some Muslim women are oppressed, just as some women are elsewhere in the world. Perception versus reality. In reality, some Muslims are extremists, just as are some Christians. In realtiy, some military men are leaders and some are just son’s of admirals following in Daddy’s footsteps, with a little help from his friends.

Flooding, as I learned in my first year of reporting, takes on many different shapes and sizes.

It can be harsh and immediate, like the March floods felt in southern Illinois this spring. We got 12 inches of rain about 20 hours. The land was already saturated from an overly wet winter and two major ice storms. The water rose rapidly as city storm sewers could not meet the capacity to let the water flow away. Rivers and creeks swelled out of their banks and near some reservoirs, water backed up, the creeks simply stopped emptying into the lake, because the lake was already too full.

For about three days, the rushing water stalled and it was deep, but as soon as the floodgates, both literally and figurateively, were opened to let the water flow downstream, the water abated quickly, leaving behind the smelly, silty mush that only someone who has lived through a flood can appreciate.

This was, for all intensive purposes, the very definition of a flash flood. The water came down fast and left almost as quickly.

Then, there is the type of flooding we are anticipating on the Mississippi River for the next week or more. Trained spotters and those who are familiar with the territory can see the gradual increase, the disappearance of a sand bar in the middle of the river or water lapping higher on a farm levee.

Gradual can be better. It gives people time to prepare, except when there is nothing to be done. In 1993, residents in south western Illinois sandbagged and prayed to save some communities. Valmeyer completely relocated the town to a nearby bluff after the Great Flood, but others along the riverfront stayed.

Sure some fo the land was bought out by the National Flood Insurance Plan, but the bottoms are fertile farmland and most farmers want to live close to their crops. Now, they have the agonizing wait to see if the farm levees hold and the water stays below the top of levee.

The waiting may be even more agonizing that the disaster itself. Once the flood hits, people can clean up, get to work repairing the damage done. While you wait, there isn’t much to do. Working the fields seems meaningless when they might be under water tomorrow or the next day. Beside, with seepage, ground water that literally seeps out of the river into the surrounding farmland, most of the bottoms are too wet to put a tractor in anyway.

And there is the agony of levee breaks upstream. As each town is flooded, you feel their pain and wonder if that little bit more area for the water to spread out means less stress and water trying to rip a hole in the levee that protects you. You rejoice and mourn together and wait for the water to rise.

At Chester, one of the closest points along the Mississippi to me, the river is still expected to crest about 8 feet lower than it did in 1993.  But that is little comfort to the home owners in Rockwood and Cora, who will see the flood gates on Illinois Route 3 close any day now, to protect the farms behind the levee. From Cora to Chester, the road will likely soon be impassable, as will the train tracks shipping the regions farm produce to market.

The people who live in the bottoms will tell you that the river rises and falls and they can live with that. It’s just the waiting that will kill you.

The American Red Cross domestic relief fund is in serious need of an infusion of cash. With massive flooding in Iowa and more expected further down the Mississippi River, the need for the charity to be able to keep emergency crews in the field and keep providing aid to the flood victims is an extreme high. So, the American Red cross is borrowing money so that they can keep operations active.

The news is heart-breaking and phenomenal. The most generous nation on earth and we can’t afford to help our friends and neighbors at home. In fact, to do so, the Red Cross is taking out loans.

The problem seems simple enough to fix. We need to stop sending money overseas and worry about our homeland. I know, we can’t and won’t do it and to be perfectly honest, I don’t want to. On the toher hand, when other nations decide to use their resources for improvements at home, we applaud it. Why aren’t we doing likewise?

In March, southern Illinois, parts of Missouri and Kentucky got more than 12 inches of rain in a day. Monsoon rainfall is not normal here and it resulted in significant flooding. The federal government refused to acknowledge the area as a national disaster area, so the store owners and those left homeless by the flood are on their own…or get minimal aid from the Red Cross. One friend who was displaced by flood waters for 6 days, her home had no electricity for much of that leading to rotting of everything in her refrigerator, and whose car was overtopped by the 4 foot deep flood waters, received $93 assistance from the Red Cross and a whopping bill for the deductible on her car insurance. The car still doesn’t run right, the bugs in her home are horrendous and she is struggling to recover.

Her problem is a microcosm of the issues that now face Iowa and will soon face parts of Illinois and Missouri as the Mississippi River flood spreads south.  And, that doesn’t even touch on what we as a nation face. The estimates right now is that the flooding will destroy about four percent of the season’s corn crop, so peopole nowhere near the water will be facing the wrath of Mother Nature.

And, the Red Cross, traditionally the place to turn in times of need, is out of money. Maybe, just maybe, we really do need to remember that charity begins at home.

In the spring of 1993, I was a reporter for the Southern Illinoisan newspaper in Carbondale, Illinois, and writing daily for six weeks or so about the Great Flood.

Many of the most exciting stories of my reporting career came that summer as well as many of the scariest moments of my life. At one point, as Mississippi River levees failed, the small Southern Illinois communtiy of Prairie du Roucher had to be evacuated and experts feared it would be the next levee to fail.

As we entered the community, a National Guardsman stationed on higher ground took our names and contact information for our next of kin. The community had established a warning system if the levee was breached. The old iron bell in front of the village hall would be rung. Then, depending on how big the breach was, we would have about five minutes to make it across the bottoms back to high ground. It was several miles and the Guard was warning most people that making it back to higher ground seemed unlikely.

I thought I was terrifed then, but it was an hour or so later, when I was standing on the levee interviewing a state senator and my fiance was filling sandbags that I knew true terror. No loud noise in a horror movie ever made me jump faster or higher than hearing that bell.

The levee was not breached, but the emergency officials were letting us know that even those trying to save the town had to be evacuated. The levee just to the north at Fort des Chartes had been breached and the water was rising rapidly. They were abandoning the effort to save the town in the interest of saving lives.

Strangely, that levee held throughout the 1993 flood, but the memory is one of my strongest.

Another memory from the same day reminds me constantly that help comes from all corners and should be appreciated when it comes. The church women of Prairie du Roucher set up a huge dinner that night to feed the multitudes of people there working to save their town and the reporters and politicians as well. Local prison inmates were given a work detail to help with the sandbagging and striking utility workers and coal miners were also there filling sand bags.

After the prayers were said and speeches made, the ladies told people to line up for fried chicken and barbecue dinner. Some politicians went to the front of the line and the ladies turned them away, insisting on feeding the inmates first. One old lady, speaking for them all, smacked a politician with her wooden spoon, saying, “I didn’t see you lift a sand bag all day except for the cameras. These boys are saving my home!”

Today, the flood waters are still mostly north of here, with Iowa bearing the brunt of it, but the water is coming. At Chester, Illinois, the measuring posint for me, the Mississippi River is supposed to crest next week some 13 feet lower than it did that year, but still high enough to threaten the Chester bridge and mean Menard Correctional Center ( a medium security state prison) will have areas under water again.

This may not be the 100-year flood we saw in 1993, but for those of us along the rivers, the memories and the fear that goes with them are flooding back.

Yesterday, I had a late lunch while grocery shopping at my favorite burger joint, Backyard Burgers. Since I hate onions and prefer to not eat the leaf lettuce they use, I asked for my burger without them.  As always, the burger was just as I ordered, except that it was sans tomato too.

I like fresh tomato on a burger. And I missed it yesterday when, incompliance with Food and Drug Administration suggestions, the tomato was not an option for my burger. Backyard Burgers, Burger King, Panera Bread and McDonald’s are among the chains that banned the happy red fruit because of an e. coli outbreak, or maybe it’s salmonella, that has made 145 people ill in a dozen states.

Frankly, I am not impressed. I mean why is it that we expect these people to be sanitary enough to prepare our food, but can’t just issue a warning that says wash the tomatoes? 

I am not a libertarian, but I am beginning to think that the government will protect us to death. To be honest, the tomatoes are just the latest in the series of completely overprotective measures taken by our government. I even see the need to refrain from serving the tomatoes to people with a compromised immune system, pregnant women and small children, really I do. But if I listened to my government, I would soon get the idea that nothing is safe.

To believe government statistics, I’m certain that I should be dead by now. As a child, I played kiss chase, dodge ball and flag football. My school playgrounds has tetherballs and swings and monkey bars. I rode a bike without a helmet (though I always wore then on the ATV and motorcyle), I rode a horse bareback and without any protective gear, I swam in unchlorinated lakes and even had unprotected sex a time or two.

I’m not saying that my decisions were always wise, especially regarding sex, but as I look at the world around me now,  I fear for children who will never know the joy of having a fish nibble your toes or putting tomatoes straight from the vine into their mouths. I wonder if there isn’t something to the theory that we are sanitizing ourselves to death.

With anti-bacterial soap, lotion and coutner cleanser, we have somehow ended up with MRSA. With arguably the most regulated and safest food distribution network in the world, we still have salmonella and e.coli outbreaks. People still catch the flu.

It seems to me that our current preoccupation with making sure that everything is as clean as it can be has lead to a nation of wusses and the inability to handle even the mildest infection. When everyone fears every little bug, can a pandemic be far behind?

Yesterday, my mother called me to ask how we had faired when bad weather struck our region. Confused by the question, I  looked at a weather map and local news headlines. Nope, still 90 degrees and no storms in sight. So, I called home. Mom had gone to the store, so I talked to my brother.

“We saw that Chicago had some bad storms and worried about you.”

Ummm. Okay, except that you know that Chicago is six hours north of me. Why would their bad weather affect me?  The flooding in southern Indiana is only about two hours away and the tornado southwest of St. Louis was about 3 hours away as the crow or tornado flies, but that’s really not that close to me. Did you think that because it was in Illinois it was close to me?  Think again. Illinois is up to 150 miles wide and is 400 miles long, north to south. The temperature and weather differences between here and Chicago are phenomenal.

A friend in California has the same problem. Her family thinks that she lives near Disneyland and I guess she does, if you think that 7 hours by car is “near.”

My California friend grew up in Europe, and remarked that she is appalled by the number of Americans who know nothing about Europe. My overwhelming impression of Europe is just how small it is.

A friend of my husband’s recently came to New York City for the weekend on business and emailed to see if we wanted to stop by to see here while she was there. He had to explain to her that New York is about 20 hours from here by car. There is no “stopping by”.

The problem, as I see it, is that people lose their frame of reference and have no concept of geography. Pam, the visitor from Europe, was accustomed to all sorts of countries jammed together in a small place. So, since we were within the same country as New York, it couldn’t possibly be that far away, right?

My family, though, has no excuse. They have driven through Chicago on the way to see me, knowing that Chicago is not even the halfway point and yet they assumed that the line of storms was 300 miles long and hit here too. I know they know better.

In their defense though, the Detroit-area news is incredibly insular. Last year while visiting there, I ahd to turn to cable networks to determine what the weather would be like when i came home. The local news didn’t even give a weather forecast for all of Michigan, much less the surrounding states.

Added to that, I am i suppose in a sort of no man’s land. We live in southern Illinois, close to Nashville and Memphis than to chicago. Indianapolis and Louisville are close too. St. Louis, Missouri, is the nearest big city and I get my nightly news from three states, Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky. Each station is less than 75 minutes from my front door.

And, I live in the South. Carbondale is south of the Mason-Dixon Line, (learn your history too) and on the border of the slave states. Several area landmarks are known to have been part of the Underground Railroad. Most people drink sweet tea, though I hate it, still have Southern manners, and have a bit of a problem with Yankees and people from Chicago. They are not joking when they suggest we leave Illinois and let Chicago have it.

Maybe that’s why my Senator, Barack Obama, thought there were 57 states. He was thinking of how things ought to be!