Contributors

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Does Texas Want to Secede Now?

The flooding in Texas is horrible. It's unprecedented, everyone is saying.

But it was predicted. Climate scientists have been predicting this kind of catastrophe for decades. And it's only going to get worse.

People are praising the citizens of Houston for being civic minded, checking on their neighbors, helping each other out. Yes, helping people you know and live near is praiseworthy.

But so is helping people who live in other states. Every Republican member of congress from Texas is hell-bent on repealing Obama's health care law, taking away health care from people who live in New York and California. Yet now they are all demanding that New York and California -- through the Federal government -- literally bail them out of this horrific flood, right this very minute.

I have no problem with that. We should help Texas get through this terrible disaster. But things have got to change.

People have to stop denying the truth of climate change and sea level rise. They have to stop burning so much fossil fuel. They have to drive more efficient cars and use more wind and solar power.

They have to acknowledge that oil and gas extraction has caused the coast to subside in Texas and Louisiana, and has made flooding and storm surge worse. Houston has been overbuilt -- they have paved over the entire area, making it impossible for rain to seep into the water table normally.

People who live in houses that have been flooded two or three times have to move -- and that's according to a Texas Republican. This is the third year running that Houston has had a 500-year flood. This timely article was written six months ago:

Following historic floods across the Greater Houston area last spring, county and city entities have worked on a number of projects to address flood mitigation and water rescue challenges in the Tomball and Magnolia areas.

Local officials said the April 2016 and Memorial Day 2015 floods were 500-year events—meaning affected areas have a 0.2 percent chance of flooding in a given year, according to the Harris County Flood Control District.

“[It was] unprecedented to have two 500-year storms back to back,” Tomball Public Works Director David Esquivel said. “With that being said, I don’t know if there’s any one entity that’s going to design for that kind of storm event.”
Americans across the country should be helping Texas. And Texas should want to return the favor and help the rest of the country in two or three years after they've recovered and something bad has happened to us.

During Barack Obama's presidency many Texans wanted to leave the Union. They thought Obama was going to impose martial law. They didn't want their own citizens to have access to health care. Those same citizens that they're now pulling out of their flooding houses.

Why do Texans work so hard to save their neighbors in a disaster, but kick them to the curb every other day of the year?

The United States works because we're a huge country. We're extremely diverse -- when one sector of the economy tanks, or there's a massive hurricane on the Gulf Coast, or a crop-killing drought in California, or six feet of snow gets dumped on Boston, or dozens of tornadoes clobber Missouri and Arkansas, the rest of us can pick up the slack.

The separatist mind-set of the white supremacists and Texas nationalists weakens the Union. There was a saying once, it's hard to remember how it goes with all the crap Donald Trump keeps throwing around (now he's threatening to shut down the government unless he gets his useless wall). What was that saying?

Oh, yeah. "United we stand, divided we fall."

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