Nature Is A Mother....

Now comes word that an arctic seal lost its way and ended up in Florida. Where it died. We get that. We've been to Ft. Lauderdale, which is up to its nipples in lost creatures awaiting death - however far away it may be. It happens. It's one thing to make the choice to head to fairer climes - witness the multiplied hundreds of Florida synagogues full of Bronx-accented worshippers. It's quite another to have Mother Nature escort you down a path you didn't choose.

We've been glued to the news where our fair state has become ground zero in the debate over draining domestic resources to fuel the occupation of a country that refuses to be a country. It's not just Greensburg, Kansas. The Missouri River divides the livable side (Kansas) from the unfortunate side (Missouri). Folks who live on one side wouldn't live on the other if you paid them. We'll cross the line to buy liquor on Sunday or gamble in their casinos. They'll return the favor to watch Nascar or visit the embarrassingly large Furniture Store That Should Have Been Ikea.

The Mighty Mo (the river, potty brain) is treating us to its annual ritual of failing to color within its lines. As the snows from Iowa, Nebraska and the other tundra states to our north make their way downriver, joined by Spring rains, last year's drought becomes irrelevant. The river and its tributaries take their toll on farms, homes, bridges and roads in numbers that far exceed tornado damage annually. Floods simply don't make for great TV unless you have a hurricane to open the show.

Five levees have broken along the Missouri River in the last 48 hours. I don't know how many broke around the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina. I do know that if your house is affected by a levee's breach, it doesn't much matter how many other levees did their job. Thousands of people are fleeing their homes today. That bears repeating.

Today, thousands of Kansans and Missourians are fleeing their homes...most of them 5 hours or more from where Greensburg used to stand.

Water, that essence of life, leaves the most amazingly grotesque destruction when it runs amok. Today, Our Only President will be in the neighborhood to look at a town that became rubble. He has no plans to visit the thousands of displaced people who are running from a river.

He won't be helping. He'll just be looking. He'll have the opportunity to apologize to our Governor, who is helping. A cursory glance at the right-wing pundits and bloggers finds them vilifying Governor Sebelius for being an incompetent bitch, essentially, and mangling the clean-up effort in Greensburg while staring down the barrel of floods that just fall short of the 1993 disaster. Let's put this in terms a Conservative might understand.

Assume you have 3 million sinners you'd like to execute. You own 300,000 guns and plenty of ammo, but you loaned 299,999 of them to Washington to help in the Iraqi Occupation. Correction: You didn't loan them. They were taken from you in the name of patriotism, God, and all that is right. It will now take you a very long time to kill 3 million sinners...certainly much longer than it might have taken if you had all 300,000 assault rifles that you cherish like your velvet Jesus painting in the NRA commemorative frame. It's not that you can't get them killed...eventually...it's that it would be a lot quicker with all the guns in hand. Then you could get back to taking your social cues from Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. Got it?

Now....think of sinners as houses that have crumbled like toothpicks and imagine the guns are backloaders, dumptrucks, and flatbeds. And instead of murder, it's clean-up. Got it? We aren't politicizing a tornado. We just want our trucks back...temporarily....so the 2-square-mile town can be cleaned up in a week, and not endure our own Katrina-paced cleanup. Oh...and so do all the other governors in all the other states.

We weren't caught off guard by a tornado. Nature's a bitch and twisters come with living in the land of Oz. Floods happen. We would prefer to not impose on your international disaster of a war by asking you to move the remains of the bank from the town's only intersection...but if you're finished with the queen, can we have our trucks back now?

Asshole.