"This is our Tsunami"

So spoke Biloxi Mayor A. J. Holloway upon witnessing the devastation Hurricane Katrina visited on Mississippi and Louisiana. As Americans open their checkbooks and pour millions of dollars in private donations--and surely billions soon in public funds--to aid the victims of what may turn out to be the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history, we must do more than answer the cries of grief.

We must also listen to the warning. Because this catastrophe has more in commmon with the 2004 Christmas tsunami than just the scenes of coastal devastation; like the tsunami, it was also preventable.

No, the earthquake which caused the tsuanmi could not have been stopped by modern technology, nor can we control the weather. But just as the Indian Ocean could have been equipped with tsunami warning systems, so we could have built better dams and levees in Louisiana. Are such things expensive? Yes.

But it's not like we don't have the money. We have now spent $192 billion on a certain Middle Eastern military venture. And we regularly spend half a trillion a year on "national defense." What could we do with money on that scale--even just a fraction of it--to defend our nation from what really threatens us?

We could have built dams and levees that withstood Hurricane Katrina--a few billion a year buys a lot of sandbags. We could have built a lot of tsunami warning systems. It's time we look at "Homeland Security" in this broader sense. It's time to make investments in national defense that we know will pay off. It's time to invest in the protection and preservation of our climate and our planet. It's time to aggressively protect our citizens.

Mount Ranier in Washington State is a ticking bomb. It is widely expected to erupt before this century ends. Heck, it could be tomorrow. California will experience "The Big One" before 2100 (many predict much sooner.) There will be regular hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and tornadoes in the Midwest. And then there's the best-predicted, most-watched, oncoming world-wide flood in history: global climate change. Coming to a coastline near you sometime this century.

When the ocean levels rise and coastal cities everywhere--Miami, Washington D.C., New York, Boston--join the ranks of the drowned; when the Mississippi delta looks like the Ganges and every year brings hurricanes worse than Katrina... what will they say? Will they wring their hands and say, "how could we know?" Will they say, "there was nothing we could have done?" Oh yes. They will try. The conservative elite will wave their hands and try to make us forget that it was all preventable.

But the truth is we all can see it coming and it just costs more than they are willing to spend. So instead of taking reasonable precautions to prevent a global cataclysm, we sit like a stubborn old Victorian lady having her tea in the middle of the highway, dismissing all those who try to warn her of an oncoming convoy, saying, "I've already got everything set up just the way I like it! You can't be certain one of them will hit me. I just can't be bothered to move."

So when you send your money to the Red Cross, send a note to your Senators to remind them an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And when you send your thoughts and prayers to the families devastated by this hurricane, spare a thought also to the global tsunami to come.